The architecture of Intel chips has dominated the personal computer landscape for several years.
The 16-bit Intel 8086 appeared in the late 1970s and was soon followed by another 16-bit chip—the Intel 8088—which was notable for being the chip used in the original IBM PC.
Both the 8086 chip and the 8088 chip were based on a segmented architecture. Intel later produced a series of 32-bit chips the IA-32—which included the family of 32-bit Pentium processors.
The IA-32 architecture supported both paging and segmentation. More recently, Intel has produced a series of 64-bit chips based on the x86-64 architecture.
Currently, all the most popular PC operating systems run on Intel chips, including Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux (although Linux, of course, runs on several other architectures as well). Notably, however, Intel’s dominance
has not spread to mobile systems, where the ARM architecture currently enjoys considerable success (see Section 8.8)