In fact, the 8086 processor didn't get much attention at the beginning of its release, and it wasn't widely adopted at the beginning, but its position in the PC industry was not excessive, because it brought x86. It not only makes Intel's position in full swing, but also becomes the industry standard. Even on today's powerful multi-core processors, x86 can be seen.
In the 30-year development history, x86 family has been growing, from desktop to notebook, server, supercomputer and writing equipment. During this period, it also frustrated or restricted the development of many competitors, making many processor manufacturers and their architecture technologies become historical monuments, even if some closed developments are unsustainable, such as Apple has given up PowerPC.
Of course, we can't forget the struggle between x86-64 and EM64T. In 2003, AMD introduced Athlon 64, the industry's first 64-bit processor, and also brought x86-64, a 64-bit extended superset of x86 instruction set, which is backward compatible. At that time, Intel was also implementing 64-bit technology, but its IA64 architecture was not compatible with x86, and it was only used on the server processor An Teng. In order to compete with AMD, Intel also launched its own 64-bit version of x86, namely EM64T, in 2004.
AMD and Intel blame each other for this, but in any case, they have at least promoted the development and popularization of 64-bit technology and continued to develop x86 technology. David Patterson, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley and one of the inventors of RISC, said: "This proves that the flexibility of x86 instruction set can be used against Intel, so even if Intel dominates the whole market, other companies can still change the development direction of x86."
X86 is the abbreviation of the standard number of Intel general-purpose computer series, which also identifies a set of general-purpose computer instructions. X has nothing to do with the processor. It is a simple wildcard definition for all *86 systems, such as i386,586 and Pentium. In the early days, intel's CPU numbers were 8086 and 80286, and the whole series of CPUs were instruction compatible, so X86 was used to identify the instruction set used. The current Pentium, P2, P4 and Celeron series all support X86 instruction system, so they all belong to X86 family.
The X86 instruction set was specially developed by Intel Corporation for its first 16-bit CPU(i8086). The CPU in the world's first personal computer, i8088 (simplified version of i8086), which was introduced by IBM in the United States in 198 1 year, also adopted X86 instructions. At the same time, an X87 chip series mathematical coprocessor is added to the computer, which improves the floating-point data processing ability. Although with the continuous development of CPU technology, Intel has successively developed updated series i80386 and i80486 until today's Pentium 4 (hereinafter referred to as P4), in order to ensure that computers can continue to run various applications developed in the past to protect and inherit rich software resources, all CPUs produced by Intel still use X86 instruction sets, so their CPUs still belong to X86 series.
Besides Intel, AMD and Cyrix have also produced CPUs that can use X86 instruction set. Because these CPUs can run all kinds of software developed for Intel CPU, people in the computer industry list these CPUs as Intel's CPU compatible products. Because Intel X86 series and its compatible CPUs all use X86 instruction set, today's huge lineup of X86 series and compatible CPUs is formed. Of course, not all desktop (portable) computers use X86 series CPU, and some servers and Macintosh computers also use Alpha 6 1 164 and PowerPC 604e series CPU of American Digital Company.
Intel started from 8086, and 286, 386, 486, 586, P 1, P2, P3 and P4 all adopted the same CPU architecture, collectively referred to as X86.