Gregory's ServerIntel's Israel site was opened in 1974, Intel's first design and development center outside the US. In this thread, I'll look at some of the important vintage chips designed at Intel Israel, such as the 8088 processor. 1/9
 6 comments
I recently found the name of the 8088's designer, Rafi Retter, in Hebrew on the 8088, hidden in polysilicon that was obscured under the metal layer. The Intel 8087 math coprocessor (1980) was also designed at Intel Israel. You could plug the chip into your IBM PC and do floating post math up to 100 times faster. 4/9 One interesting thing about the 8087 is that you can look at the ROM on the chip and extract constants such as Pi. The Intel 82586 (1983) is an Ethernet controller chip designed by Intel Israel. It is a coprocessor that contains its own CPU (lower right) to execute command blocks in memory. I created this block diagram showing the components. 6/9  |
The 8088 processor was designed at Intel Israel. This is indicated on the die as "i/IL". The Intel 8088 was selected for the IBM PC (1981), ensuring the success of the x86 architecture. The 8088 is a 16-bit chip internally but uses an 8-bit bus to reduce system cost. The 8088 is mostly the same as the 8086 but the bus control is redesigned, the prefetch queue is smaller, and there are numerous changes throughout the chip. 2/9