Intel 8088
Intel microprocessor model that was released in 1979
The Intel 8088 ("eighty-eighty-eight", also called iAPX 88) microprocessor is a variant of the Intel 8086. Introduced on June 1, 1979, the 8088 has an eight-bit external data bus instead of the 16-bit bus of the 8086. The 16-bit registers and the one megabyte address range are unchanged, however. In fact, according to the Intel documentation, the 8086 and 8088 have the same execution unit (EU)—only the bus interface unit (BIU) is different. The 8088 was used in the original IBM PC and in IBM PC compatible clones.
History and description
The 8088 was designed at Intel's laboratory in Haifa, Israel (as were a large number of Intel's processors) as a lower-cost version of the 8086.
The 8088 was targeted at economical systems by allowing the use of an eight-bit data path and eight-bit support and peripheral chips; complex circuit boards were still fairly cumbersome and expensive when it was released. The prefetch queue of the 8088 was shortened to four bytes from the 8086's six bytes, and the prefetch algorithm was slightly modified to adapt to the narrower bus. These modifications of the basic 8086 design were one of the first jobs assigned to Intel's new design office and laboratory in Haifa.
Variants of the 8088 with more than 5 MHz maximal clock frequency include the 8088–2, which was fabricated using Intel's new enhanced nMOS process called HMOS and specified for a maximal frequency of 8 MHz.
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This entry incorporates text from “Intel 8088” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.