Intel iAPX 432

Intel iAPX 432

Intel Corporation logo, 1968–2006
Produced	From late 1981 to ca 1985
Common manufacturer(s)	Intel
Max. CPU clock rate	5 MHz to 8 MHz

The iAPX 432 (Intel Advanced Performance Architecture) was a computer architecture introduced in 1981. It was Intel's first 32-bit processor design. The main processor of the architecture, the general data processor, was implemented as a set of two separate integrated circuits, due to technical limitations at the time. The project started in 1975 as the 8800 (after the 8008 and the 8080) and was intended to be Intel's major design for the 1980s.

The iAPX 432 project is considered a commercial failure for Intel, and was discontinued in 1986.

(Note that, although some early 8086, 80186 and 80286-based systems and manuals also used the iAPX prefix for marketing reasons, the iAPX 432 and the 8086 processor lines are completely separate designs with completely different instruction sets.)

The iAPX 432 was referred to as a micromainframe, designed to be programmed entirely in high-level languages. The instruction set architecture was also entirely new and a significant departure from Intel's previous 8008 and 8080 processors as the iAPX 432 programming model was a stack machine with no visible general-purpose registers. It supported object-oriented programming, garbage collection and multitasking as well as more conventional memory management directly in hardware and microcode. Direct support for various data structures was also intended to allow modern operating systems to be implemented using far less program code than for ordinary processors. Intel iMAX 432 was an operating system for the 432, written entirely in Ada, and Ada was also the intended primary language for application programming. In some aspects, it may be seen as a high-level language computer architecture.