the microproces- sors seem to be quite the same. An example of this is the cycle time. The cycletime is 250 nanoseconds and the average number of cycles that occur per instruction are be- tween 10 and 14 for both microprocessors (Avtar, 25). The nextmicroprocessor that will be discussed is the 8086. This microproces- sor is the best in my opinion, out of all the 16-bit microprocessors. Not only because thespeeds of processing are tremendous, but because it simply paved the way to the 32-bit microprocessors using various techniques that will be discussed later. The8086 was the second Intel microprocessor (being preceded by the 8080) (Avtar, 19). The 8086 was introduced in early 1978 by Intel (Avtar, 19). Like so many ofthe other processors the 8086 is register oriented with fourteen 16-bit registers, eight of which are used for general processing purposes (Avtar, 19). The 8086 candirectly address 1MB (1,048,576 bytes) which is used only in accessing Read Only Memory. The ba- sic clock frequency for the 8086 is between 4MHz and8MHz depending on the type of 8086 microprocessor that is used (Avtar, 20). Up until this point in the paper there have been common reoccurring phrase such as amicroprocessor containing 14 16-bit registers. At this time in the evolution of microprocessors come the 32-bit register, which obviously has double the capacity tohold information for the microprocessor. Because of this simple increase of the register capacity we have a whole different type of microprocessor. Although the 16-bit and 32-bit microprocessors are quite different (meaning they have more compo- nents and such), the 32-bit microprocessors will be described in the same termsas the 16-bit microprocessors were. The remainder of the paper will discuss the 32-bit microprocessor series. The external data bus is a term that will be referred toin the remainder of the paper is. The data bus is basically what brings data from the memory to the processor and ...
