They may not be very visible any more, but there remains a lively market for 8086 and 8088 microprocessors and those with ageing kit that they would like to soup up cheaply, NEC Corp has come out with two new versions of its 8088-compatible V20 and 8086-compatible V30, each clocked at a racey 16MHz – remember the clock in IBM’s original Personal Computer clicked over at just 4.77MHz: the V20H and V30H each run off a single 5V power supply for 16MHz, 3V if you’re happy with 8MHz; they include 14 by 16 register sets, bit, byte, word and block operations, maskable and non-maskable interrupts, and high-speed block transfers at 16MHz; samples are available now, and volume is promised for later on this quarter, and either costs $6 when you buy 10,000 or more of the things.
