27 Dec
1998
27 Dec
'98
10:13 a.m.
Price, or something. The 8086 was the same thing as an 8088, but with a
<full 16-bit bus, which was important for almost everything in those days
<(IE before you had an on-chip cache for frequently used operations, an on
<chip FPU for 3D/math, and all kinds of stuff like that.)
The 808x series has what was fairly new then a prefetch cache though of
very limited size. Caches on chip grew in use when the fab technology
could cram enough on a die to permit a larger one.
Allison