= History =
Developed in After the mid‑1970s as 8080, Intel began working on the iAPX 432 project. It was an ambitious 32‑bit design—aimed at supporting advanced, high‑level programming features in hardware—which took several years and a response large team to develop, partly because it awaited further improvements in chip density per Moore’s Law. Meanwhile, to quickly counter the growing need for greater processing power and memory capacitycompetition, Intel rushed a simpler, lower‑risk design: the 8086 was designed to bridge . This chip, developed as an incremental evolution of the gap between earlier 8‑bit processors (like the [[Intel 8080]] and 8085) and the future of 16‑bit computingmanaged by a separate team, was ready for mass market in 1978.
The chip’s design was partly influenced by the need to maintain some backward compatibility with 8‑bit software while also providing a richer instruction set for high‑level languages such as Pascal and PL/M.
Although the [[PC|IBM PC]] later used the nearly identical 8088 (which featured an 8‑bit external data bus for cost savings), the 8086 itself became the architectural blueprint for the x86 family, directly influencing later processors.
As for the iAPX 432, it turned out to be a commercial failure, and was discontinued in 1986.
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