iAPX

In marketing, iAPX (Intel Advanced Performance Architecture) was a short lived designation used for several <a href="/facts/Intel/SMF0gJJX">Intel</a> microprocessors, including some <a href="/facts/8086/sS9dlSdK">8086</a> family processors. 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.
The iAPX prefix originally belonged to the <a href="/facts/Intel_iAPX_432/z0xPqFQf">Intel iAPX 432</a> architecture, alias <a href="/facts/Intel_8800/z0xPqFQf">Intel 8800</a>. 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. This was abandoned rather soon, however. The industry around the 8088- and 80286-based <a href="/facts/De_facto_standard/TRELHVwI">de facto standard</a> of <a href="/facts/IBM_PC/yhcJGMPL">IBM PC</a> and <a href="/facts/IBM_AT/YEVHpWKF">IBM AT</a> 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).

iAPX open-in-new

iAPX