X86

x86 denotes a family of instruction set architectures based on the Intel 8086 CPU. The 8086 was introduced in 1978 as a fully 16-bit extension of Intel’s 8-bit based 8080 microprocessor and also introduced memory segmentation to overcome the 16-bit addressing barrier of such designs. The term x86 derived from the fact that early successors to the 8086 also had names ending with “86”.