IAPX

This article is about iAPX as a name. For the most well-known iAPX CPUs, see Intel iAPX 432 or iAPX 86.
Not to be confused with Intel Advanced Performance Extensions (APX).

In marketing, iAPX (Intel Advanced Performance Architecture[1]) was a short lived designation used for several Intel microprocessors, including some 8086 family processors.[2] Not being a simple initialism seems to have confused even Intel's technical writers as can be seen in their iAPX-88 Book where the asterisked expansion shows iAPX to mean Intel Advanced Processor System.[3]

The iAPX prefix originally belonged to the Intel iAPX 432 architecture, alias Intel 8800. However, as this radical design failed in the marketplace, Intel also tried it on its more conventional 8086-family of processors, mainly used as a kind of system prefix but also to denote individual processors in the family. The 8086 based line was therefore called the iAPX 86 series for a few years during the early 1980s.[2][4] This was abandoned rather soon, however. The industry around the 8088- and 80286-based de facto standard of IBM PC and IBM AT designs also seldom used that naming scheme. As a result, the iAPX prefix is now, again, more closely associated with the (non-x86) iAPX 432 architecture (which, although a commercial failure, is often seen as historically important).

  1. ^ "dvorak.org". Archived from the original on 2017-11-25. Retrieved 2014-03-19.
  2. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference Intel_1983_iAPX286 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ Intel iAPX 88 Book Archived 2016-04-27 at the Wayback Machine (page i)
  4. ^ "iAPX 86, iAPX 88 user's manual" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-05-22. Retrieved 2014-03-19.