Home > Computing Happy 42nd Anniversary to the Original Intel 8086 and the x86 Architecture Happy 40th birthday to one of the most important CPUs ever built -- and the beginning of the PC revolution.

The Intel 8085 microprocessor was introduced 40 years back, and along with its contemporaries — the Z80 and the 6502 — is pretty much a dinosaur in terms of microprocessor history. But that ...

Previously, Intel had its own 64-bit chip in Itanium, but that microprocessor was a new design and was criticized for not performing as well with existing 32-bit applications.

Forty years ago, Intel released the 8086 processor, introducing the x86 architecture that underlies every PC—Windows, Mac, or Linux—produced today.

Now they’re on their own, flying without a net, building a new class of microprocessor on an entirely different architecture from Intel’s.