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Concept
X86
Summary
x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was introduced in 1978 as a fully 16-bit extension of Intel's 8-bit 8080 microprocessor, with memory segmentation as a solution for addressing more memory than can be covered by a plain 16-bit address. The term "x86" came into being because the names of several successors to Intel's 8086 processor end in "86", including the 80186, 80286, 80386 and 80486 processors. Colloquially, their names were "186", "286", "386" and "486".
The term is not synonymous with IBM PC compatibility, as this implies a multitude of other computer hardware. Embedded systems and general-purpose computers used x86 chips before the PC-compatible market started, some of them before the IBM PC (1981) debut.
most desktop and laptop computers sold are based on the x86 architecture family, while mobile categories such as smartphones or tablets are dominated by ARM. At the high end, x86 continues to dominate computation-intensive workstation and cloud computing segments. The fastest supercomputer in the TOP500 list for June 2022 was the first exascale system, Frontier, built using AMD Epyc CPUs based on the x86 ISA; it broke the 1 exaFLOPS barrier in May 2022.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, when the 8088 and 80286 were still in common use, the term x86 usually represented any 8086-compatible CPU. Today, however, x86 usually implies a binary compatibility also with the 32-bit instruction set of the 80386. This is due to the fact that this instruction set has become something of a lowest common denominator for many modern operating systems and probably also because the term became common after the introduction of the 80386 in 1985.
A few years after the introduction of the 8086 and 8088, Intel added some complexity to its naming scheme and terminology as the "iAPX" of the ambitious but ill-fated Intel iAPX 432 processor was tried on the more successful 8086 family of chips, applied as a kind of system-level prefix.
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