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rebane2001yesterday at 8:20 AM2 repliesview on HN

8086 is x86

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86


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voidUpdateyesterday at 8:25 AM

The instruction matrix they provide only includes 8086 instructions, not 186, 286 etc, which are all x86, hence the x at the start. From that wikipedia article, "The term "x86" came into being because the names of several successors to Intel's 8086 processor end in "86", including the 80186, 80286, 80386 and 80486. Colloquially, their names were "186", "286", "386" and "486"."

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antonvsyesterday at 2:32 PM

The point is that the 8086 doesn't have anything close to the instruction set now referred to as x86_64 or even x86_32. Asking which it is is asking which instruction set it implements. The answer is that it implements the 8086 instruction set.

Saying this is an "x86 CPU emulator" is misleading, even if technically an 8086 is an example of the x86 family. To avoid the misleading ambiguity you'd have to say something like "emulates a member of the x86 family", at which point you may as well just say "8086 emulator".

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