The 80186 is a
microprocessor that was developed by
Intel circa
1982. The 80186 was an improvement on the
Intel 8086 and
Intel 8088. As with the 8086, it had a
16-bit external bus and was also available as the
Intel 80188, with an
8-bit external
data bus. The initial clock rate of the 80186 and 80188 was 6
MHz, but due to more hardware (in place of
microcode) some of the individual instructions ran 10-20 times faster than on an 8086 at the same clock frequency. On the average, it ran at 1 million
instructions per second.
[1] They were generally used as
embedded processors (roughly comparable to
microcontrollers). They were not used in many
personal computers, but there were some notable exceptions: the
Mindset, the Siemens PC-D (the first DOS PC line of Siemens, with MSDOS v2.11), the
Compis (a
Swedish school computer), the
RM Nimbus (a British school computer), the
Unisys ICON (a Canadian school computer), the
HP 200lx, the
Tandy 2000 desktop (a somewhat PC-compatible workstation featuring particularly sharp graphics for its day) and the Philips "Yes". Another British computer manufacturer,
Acorn, created a plug-in second processor that contained the 80188 chip along with assorted support chips and 512 KiB of RAM – hence the Master 512 system.
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<
processor> A
microprocessor developed by
Intel circa 1982. The 80186 was an improvement on the
Intel 8086 and
Intel 8088. As with the 8086, it had a 16-bit
external bus and was also available as the
Intel 80188, with an 8-bit external
data bus. The initial
clock rate of the 80186 and 80188 was 6 MHz. They were not used in many computers, but one notable exception was the
Mindset, a very advanced computer for the time. They were used as
embedded processors.
One major function of the 80186/80188 series was to reduce the number of chips required.
"To satisfy this market, we defined a processor with a significant performance increase over the 8086 that also included such common peripheral functions as software-controlled wait state and chip select logic, three timers, priority interrupt controller, and two channels of DMA (direct memory access). This processor, the 80186, could replace up to 22 separate VLSI (very large scale integration) and TTL (transistor-transistor logic) packages and sell for less than the cost of the parts it replaced."
-- Paul Wells of Intel Corporation writing in Byte (reference below)
New instructions were also introduced as follows:
ENTER Make stcak frame for procedure parameters LEAVE High-level procedure exit PUSHA Push all general registers POPA Pop all general registers BOUND Check array index against bounds IMUL Signed (integer) multiply INS Input from port to string OUTS Output string to port
["The Evolution of the iAPX 286", Bob Greene, Intel Corporation, PC Tech Journal, December 1984, page 134].
["The 80286 Microprocessor", Paul Wells, Intel Corporation, Byte, November 1984, p. 231].
(1999-05-10)
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