   thumb|intel a80386dx-20 cpu die image the intel 80386 ("eighty-three-eighty-six"), also known as i386 or just 386, is a 32-bit microprocessor introduced in 1985.more precise: the 80386 architecture was presented in detail in 1984. samples were produced in 1985 (possibly late 1984) with massproduction and delivery of a final version starting in june 1986. the first versions had 275,000 transistorsmit.edu - the future of fpgas (cornell) 2012-10-11 and were the cpu of many workstations and high-end personal computers of the time. as the original implementation of the 32-bit extension of the 80286 architecture,which iself was an extension of the 8086-architecture with advanced memory management functions and significantly better performance. the 80386 instruction set, programming model, and binary encodings are still the common denominator for all 32-bit x86 processors, which is termed the i386-architecture, x86, or ia-32, depending on context. the 32-bit 80386 can correctly execute most code intended for the earlier 16-bit processors such as 8088 and 80286 that were ubiquitous in early pcs. (following the same tradition, modern 64-bit x86 processors are able to run most programs written for older x86 cpus, all the way back to the original 16-bit 8086 of 1978.) over the years, successively newer implementations of the same architecture have become several hundreds of times faster than the original 80386 (and thousands of times faster than the 8086).not counting the advances in the performance of corresponding x87 implementations. these are measured in tens of thousands of times, compared to the original 8087, or hundreds of thousands of times compared to software implementations of floating point on the 8086. a 33&nbsp;mhz 80386 was reportedly measured to operate at about 11.4 mips.intel 80386 the 80386 was launched in october 
1985_introductions Intel_x86_microprocessors