The
Intel 8088 ("
eighty-eighty-eight", also called
iAPX 88)
microprocessor is a variant of the
Intel 8086. Introduced on July 1, 1979, the 8088 had an 8-bit external
data bus instead of the
16-bit bus of the 8086. The 16-bit registers and the one
megabyte address range were unchanged, however. In fact, according to the Intel documentation, the 8086 and 8088 have the same
execution unit (EU)—only the
bus interface unit (BIU) is different. The original
IBM PC was based on the 8088.