From: utzoo!decvax!cca!sdyer@Bbn-Unix@sri-unix
Newsgroups: net.micro
Title: 
Article-I.D.: sri-unix.3103
Posted: Sat Sep  4 11:49:55 1982
Received: Thu Sep  9 07:03:30 1982

From: Steve Dyer 

>From a programmer's point of view, the 8086 and the 8088 are identical;
they both execute the same opcodes, and have the same 20-bit address
space.  The difference come in the way they interface to the outside
world.  The 8086 uses a 16-bit data bus, the 8088 uses an 8-bit bus.
Therefore, the 8088 runs somewhat slower than the same speed 8086
when operating upon word-aligned data, since the 8088 must make two bus
requests to get 16 bits of data.

/Steve Dyer

P.S.: Both the 8086 and 8088 have an instruction prefetch queue;
      the 8088's queue is somewhat shorter than the 8086's.  I suppose
      it would be possible to write self-modifying code that would
      behave differently on the two processors, but we all know that
      no one writes code like that more!