Enlarged color photograph of the Intel® 8086 microprocessor. Chalk the 8086 design up to Intel's competitive paranoia. "Because of the success of Zilog's 8-bit processor, we were sure they were cooking up some super processors for 16 bits and beyond," recalls Peter Stohl, lead engineer on 8086. "We knew we had to beat them to the punch. We were scared and moving fast." At the time, Intel wanted to retain backward compatibility with the large installed base of 8-bit code while providing a much greater address space-a full 1MB-and faster clock speeds of up to 5 MHz. In spite of difficult circumstances and tools rudimentary by today's standards, after only two years the 8086 team had produced working silicon. The new processor shipped in 1978 and incorporated many innovative features-it could even run in multiprocessor configurations.
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