The 8086 is a 16-bit microprocessor chip designed by Intel between early 1976 and June 8, 1978, when it was released. The Intel 8088, released July 1, 1979, is a slightly modified chip with an external 8-bit data bus, and is notable as the processor used in the original IBM PC design.
x86 is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the 8086 microprocessor and its 8-bit-external-bus variant, the 8088. The 8086 was introduced in 1978 as a fully 16-bit extension of 8-bit Intel's 8080 microprocessor, with memory segmentation as a solution for addressing more memory than can be covered by a plain 16-bit address. The term "x86" came into being because the names of several successors to Intel's 8086 processor end in "86", including the 80186, 80286, 80386 and 80486. Colloquially, their names were "186", "286", "386" and "486".
The NS32000, sometimes known as the 32k, is a series of microprocessors produced by National Semiconductor. Design work began around 1980 and it was announced at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in April 1981.
A floating-point unit (FPU), numeric processing unit (NPU), colloquially math coprocessor, is a part of a computer system specially designed to carry out operations on floating-point numbers. Typical operations are addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and square root. Some FPUs can also perform various transcendental functions such as exponential or trigonometric calculations, but the accuracy can be low, so some systems prefer to compute these functions in software.
The Motorola 68000 series is a family of 32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessors. During the 1980s and early 1990s, they were popular in personal computers and workstations and were the primary competitors of Intel's x86 microprocessors. They were best known as the processors used in the early Apple Macintosh, the Sharp X68000, the Commodore Amiga, the Sinclair QL, the Atari ST and Falcon, the Atari Jaguar, the Sega Genesis and Sega CD, the Philips CD-i, the Capcom System I (Arcade), the AT&T UNIX PC, the Tandy Model 16/16B/6000, the Sun Microsystems Sun-1, Sun-2 and Sun-3, the NeXT Computer, NeXTcube, NeXTstation, and NeXTcube Turbo, early Silicon Graphics IRIS workstations, the Aesthedes, computers from MASSCOMP, the Texas Instruments TI-89/TI-92 calculators, the Palm Pilot, the Control Data Corporation CDCNET Device Interface, the VTech Precomputer Unlimited and the Space Shuttle. Although no modern desktop computers are based on processors in the 680x0 series, derivative processors are still widely used in embedded systems.
The Intel i860 is a RISC microprocessor design introduced by Intel in 1989. It is one of Intel's first attempts at an entirely new, high-end instruction set architecture since the failed Intel iAPX 432 from the beginning of the 1980s. It was the world's first million-transistor chip. It was released with considerable fanfare, slightly obscuring the earlier Intel i960, which was successful in some niches of embedded systems. The i860 never achieved commercial success and the project was terminated in the mid-1990s.
Cyrix Corporation was a microprocessor developer that was founded in 1988 in Richardson, Texas, as a specialist supplier of floating point units for 286 and 386 microprocessors. The company was founded by Tom Brightman and Jerry Rogers.
A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit initially designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal computers, workstations, and game consoles. After their initial design, GPUs were found to be useful for non-graphic calculations involving embarrassingly parallel problems due to their parallel structure. Other non-graphical uses include the training of neural networks and cryptocurrency mining.
Weitek Corporation was an American chip-design company that originally focused on floating-point units for a number of commercial CPU designs. During the early to mid-1980s, Weitek designs could be found powering a number of high-end designs and parallel-processing supercomputers.
The Intel 8087, announced in 1980, was the first floating-point coprocessor for the 8086 line of microprocessors. The purpose of the chip was to speed up floating-point arithmetic operations, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and square root. It also computes transcendental functions such as exponential, logarithmic or trigonometric calculations. The performance enhancements were from approximately 20% to over 500%, depending on the specific application. The 8087 could perform about 50,000 FLOPS using around 2.4 watts.
Hauppauge Computer Works is a US manufacturer and marketer of electronic video hardware for personal computers. Although it is most widely known for its WinTV line of TV tuner cards for PCs, Hauppauge also produces personal video recorders, digital video editors, digital media players, hybrid video recorders and digital television products for both Windows and Mac. The company is named after the hamlet of Hauppauge, New York, in which it is based.
The AMD Am29000, commonly shortened to 29k, is a family of 32-bit RISC microprocessors and microcontrollers developed and fabricated by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). Based on the seminal Berkeley RISC, the 29k added a number of significant improvements. They were, for a time, the most popular RISC chips on the market, widely used in laser printers from a variety of manufacturers.
x87 is a floating-point-related subset of the x86 architecture instruction set. It originated as an extension of the 8086 instruction set in the form of optional floating-point coprocessors that work in tandem with corresponding x86 CPUs. These microchips have names ending in "87". This is also known as the NPX. Like other extensions to the basic instruction set, x87 instructions are not strictly needed to construct working programs, but provide hardware and microcode implementations of common numerical tasks, allowing these tasks to be performed much faster than corresponding machine code routines can. The x87 instruction set includes instructions for basic floating-point operations such as addition, subtraction and comparison, but also for more complex numerical operations, such as the computation of the tangent function and its inverse, for example.
Extended precision refers to floating-point number formats that provide greater precision than the basic floating-point formats. Extended-precision formats support a basic format by minimizing roundoff and overflow errors in intermediate values of expressions on the base format. In contrast to extended precision, arbitrary-precision arithmetic refers to implementations of much larger numeric types using special software.
Heterogeneous computing refers to systems that use more than one kind of processor or core. These systems gain performance or energy efficiency not just by adding the same type of processors, but by adding dissimilar coprocessors, usually incorporating specialized processing capabilities to handle particular tasks.
Computation offloading is the transfer of resource intensive computational tasks to a separate processor, such as a hardware accelerator, or an external platform, such as a cluster, grid, or a cloud. Offloading to a coprocessor can be used to accelerate applications including: image rendering and mathematical calculations. Offloading computing to an external platform over a network can provide computing power and overcome hardware limitations of a device, such as limited computational power, storage, and energy.
A vision processing unit (VPU) is an emerging class of microprocessor; it is a specific type of AI accelerator, designed to accelerate machine vision tasks.
An AI accelerator, deep learning processor or neural processing unit (NPU) is a class of specialized hardware accelerator or computer system designed to accelerate artificial intelligence and machine learning applications, including artificial neural networks and computer vision. Typical applications include algorithms for robotics, Internet of Things, and other data-intensive or sensor-driven tasks. They are often manycore designs and generally focus on low-precision arithmetic, novel dataflow architectures or in-memory computing capability. As of 2024, a typical AI integrated circuit chip contains tens of billions of MOSFETs.
The Intel 8231 and 8232 were early designs of floating-point maths coprocessors (FPUs), marketed for use with their i8080 line of primary CPUs. They were licensed versions of AMD's Am9511 and Am9512 FPUs, from 1977 and 1979, themselves claimed by AMD as the world's first single-chip FPU solutions.
