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!