Intel 8086

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An Intel 8086 chip.

The Intel 8086, and the closely related 8088, were early CPUs, from Intel. The 8088 was the CPU that powered the original IBM PC.

The 8086 and the 8088 executed identical instruction sets, but differed in the size of their data bus. The 8088 was slower, since it only had an 8-bit data bus, while the 8086 had a 16-bit data bus. This meant operations on 16-bit numbers would always require an extra clock cycle.

Both CPUs could address 1 megabyte of memory, in contrast to Intel's earlier 8080, which could only address 64 kilobytes of memory.