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Comment by Sharlin

10 hours ago

Sure, but this was five (or six?) generations before actual superscalar x86 processors.

Three - after 8086 you had 80286, 80386, 80486 and then Pentium (superscalar).

  • 80186 is often forgotten to have existed because it didn't see much success in the market / because IBM skipped it and went with 80286 for the AT, but it did exist.

    • The 80186 didn’t really introduce anything new architecturally. It’s basically an 8086 with a few more chips bundled on-die. 80286 however introduced protected mode, expanded the address size to 24 bit, hardware enforce memory protection, multitasking, etc.

  • Four because you have to count 8086 itself (486 was one, not zero, geverations before the Pentium and so on).