8088 microprocessor

[Analog]

It's not that I necessarily NEED to use it, it was more to the point that I came across a project book for it, thought it would be fun, and so I decided to see if I could acquire the components.

then the answer is yes, you can. It'll be a bit harder, but you can find these parts.

Did you ever watch the star trek where spock interfaced vacuum tubes to his tricorder?

 

[mrmonteith]

Gosh, thought those went to the museum. lol I'm dating myself but I used to work on the orginal IBM PCs that used these. You' re probably better off looking for the NEC V20 chip. It was a drop-in replacement for the 8088 and was faster than the 8088. The nasty part with it is working with accessing memory since it was geared for dynamic ram.

Personally I'd drop my losses and find something more current, like a PIC. You have to remember that with and 8088 type system there is a LOT of support circuitry needed to do much of anything useful.

https://www.cs.binghamton.edu/~reckert/sbc.htm

 

[Hero999]

As you say, you can't make direct comparisons, and they are intended for completely different purposes - also we've been talking of MIPS, but Intel processors have a crippled I/O system that runs at a much reduced speed to the main memory bus, so the processor MIPS doesn't really apply.

There's a reason for that, just try and imagine your whole motherboard working at 2.4GHz. Think about how long it would take for the clock to get from one side of the board to the other. It simply wouldn't work because the size of the board is too large compared to the wavelength of the clock so going beyond 400MHz is pretty impractical.

I'm pretty sure that the older Intel CPUs didn't have such a large gap between the clock and the I/O.

The number of instructions per second is also a pretty meaningless measure of performance. It depends on what the instructions are doing as well as the shear speed of execution. For example a CPU that can execute 100M powerful 64-bit floating point operations per second is much more powerful than a CPU that can do 200M simple 32-bit integer operations per second.

 

[blueroomelectronics]

Gosh, thought those went to the museum. lol I'm dating myself but I used to work on the orginal IBM PCs that used these. You' re probably better off looking for the NEC V20 chip. It was a drop-in replacement for the 8088 and was faster than the 8088. The nasty part with it is working with accessing memory since it was geared for dynamic ram.

Personally I'd drop my losses and find something more current, like a PIC. You have to remember that with and 8088 type system there is a LOT of support circuitry needed to do much of anything useful.

https://www.cs.binghamton.edu/~reckert/sbc.htm

I like the V20 & V30 chips, they were nice upgrades to the 8088 / 8086

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

I'm pretty sure that the older Intel CPUs didn't have such a large gap between the clock and the I/O.

No they didn't because the processor clock speed was slower, so obviously it wasn't as much above the I/O speed as a faster machine - as far as I'm aware, the I/O runs at the same speed regardless of the processor clock.

Wasn't the original PC clock speed only 4.7MHz or so?, how did that relate to I/O speed?.

BTW, my first Intel type PC was a V20, running at 10MHz if I recall correctly?.

 

[Analog]

No they didn't because the processor clock speed was slower, so obviously it wasn't as much above the I/O speed as a faster machine - as far as I'm aware, the I/O runs at the same speed regardless of the processor clock.

Wasn't the original PC clock speed only 4.7MHz or so?, how did that relate to I/O speed?.

BTW, my first Intel type PC was a V20, running at 10MHz if I recall correctly?.

yes, the original IBM PC ran an 8088 @ 4.77 MHz. The NEC V20 upgrade helped a little, and a lot more if the oscillator was upgraded.

 

[ecerfoglio]

yes, the original IBM PC ran an 8088 @ 4.77 MHz. The NEC V20 upgrade helped a little, and a lot more if the oscillator was upgraded.

Remember the "Turbo" switch in the XT? (circa 1987)

It changed the oscilator from 4.77 Mhz to 8 (or it was 10?) MHz

But some software wouldn't run in "turbo" and you used the switch to slow it down to 4.77...