With the release of the 8088, things began to progress quickly. The IBM PC released in 1981 utilized Intel's 8088 CPU, derived from the Intel 8086 design, and can truly be seen as the first widely adopted Personal Computer. Following this computer’s release was the 4.77 MHz (later 8 MHz) IBM PC/XT which utilized the 16-bit 8086. Two following designs, the 80188 (8-bit) and the 80186 (16-bit) were never widely adopted. However, Intel’s next CPU saw a long lifespan in PCs of the era. This processor was the 80286, and was utilized from the mid 80's to the early 90's. Initially it was released in 6 and 8 MHz variants, with a 12.5 MHz variant to follow. An interesting aside to note is that a small architecture licensee named Advanced Micro Devices, whom we all know as AMD, developed variants that operated even faster at 20 and 25 MHz respectively. The 80286's big claims to fame, and probably the core reasons behind its longevity, were that it was nearly twice as fast as the 8086 on a per clock basis and had an integrated Memory Management Unit and Protected Mode operations. Still, switching between real mode and protected mode wasn’t widely done until the 80386, Intel’s first 32-bit CPU, was released.

Released in 1986 and seeing fairly widespread use until the mid 1990's, the 80386, also referred to as the i386, was Intel's most successful CPU to date. Initially the 80386 was a very expensive CPU to manufacture and a very expensive platform to support at the mainboard and interconnect level, but these issues fell by the wayside as commoditization and market synergies brought down prices rather quickly. It's at this milestone where we find the beginning of what is known as the IA-32 architecture that up until fairly recently dominated the landscape for both Intel and its competitive variants in x86 space. The i386 was also the first CPU from Intel to offer a flat 32-bit address space. As an interesting aside, Intel was forced to modify their naming conventions due to a court ruling that prohibited the trademark of numbers, hence the "i386" moniker. The i386 was also available in a 16-bit bus version known as the 386sx and a low power version for mobile computing called the 386SL.

In 1989 Intel introduced the i486 CPU, with variants referred to as the 486SX and the 486DX. The 486DX was the first Intel CPU to house a built-in floating point math unit (FPU). Though almost identical from a software standpoint, hardware-wise the 486 was a significant improvement over the 386. Containing a unified instruction and data cache and an enhanced data bus, the i486 was nearly twice as powerful as the 386. The notable exception was the low-end 486SX with its 16-bit data bus, which was often slower than the i386 when at comparable clock rates. The i486 was also available in a lower power version, the 486SL, for laptops and portables.

At this juncture Intel began a new brand known as Pentium that continued through four x86 CPU models until just this year. The first Pentium CPU was released in 1993 and was often referred to as the "P5" (Processor, 5th generation).

The P5 came in several variants over the course of its long lifespan. The P5 ranged from 60-66 MHz, the P54 from 75-120 MHz, the P54C which ranged from 133-200 MHz, and the P55C at 120-233 MHz. The P55C was notable as being the first Intel CPU to offer the new MMX instruction set. In addition, an interesting variant of the P55C was developed at Intel's Research Center in Haifa, Israel and was known as the Tillamook. Developed for mobile computing, it was basically a P55C in a module that also housed a 430TX chipset and 512k of L2 cache memory. As we'll see later, continued developments of mobile architectures in Haifa became very important to Intel's present and future.