Intel 8088 D

An early 8088 microprocessor with it's date code 8125! This means it rolled of the assembly line in the 25th week of 1981. That's about 2 years after the initial release in 1979.

The 8088 is almost identical to the 8086 except that it has an 8-bit external databus. Internally it can process just as fast as a 8086 but communication to for example RAM is slower. In a lot of cases this doesn't impact performance that much. The reason that the 8088 exists is that motherboards can be produced in a cheaper way because they only need an 8-bit bus.

Many PC's up to even 1990 were equipped with an 8088, 8086 or NEC V20/V30 CPU. My first PC was built in 1988 which is a full 7 years later than this CPU!

Note that the 8088 and 8086 are not interchangeable. They do share the same 40-pin socket and do share the same execution unit but have a different bus unit.

So far this is the oldest x86 CPU in my collection .

A similar processor has been benchmarked! Click here to see this processor and the benchmarks.