Launched in the summer of 1978, Intel's 8086 was a 16-bit processor. It was also notable as the first of the so-called x86 architecture, which for good or bad, is still one of the dominate CPU architectures - on PCs at least - as of 2025.

It was actually only ever intended as a temporary stop-gap until Intel's iAPX 432 32-bit architecture was launched. However, that was considered as too expensive, too slow and too radical a departure from what was already an entrenched processor architecture, and so was a commercial failure.