A microprocessor developed by Intel circa 1982. The 80186 was an improvement on the Intel 8086 and Intel 8088. As with the 8086, it had a 16-bit external bus and was also available as the Intel 80188, with an 8-bit external data bus. The initial clock rate of the 80186 and 80188 was 6 MHz. They were not used in many computers, but one notable exception was the Mindset, a very advanced computer for the time. They were used as embedded processors.

One major function of the 80186/80188 series was to reduce the number of chips required.

"To satisfy this market, we defined a processor with a significant performance increase over the 8086 that also included such common peripheral functions as software-controlled wait state and chip select logic, three timers, priority interrupt controller, and two channels of DMA (direct memory access). This processor, the 80186, could replace up to 22 separate VLSI (very large scale integration) and TTL (transistor-transistor logic) packages and sell for less than the cost of the parts it replaced."

-- Paul Wells of Intel Corporation writing in Byte (reference below)

New instructions were also introduced as follows:

 ENTER        Make stcak frame for procedure parameters
 LEAVE        High-level procedure exit
 PUSHA        Push all general registers
 POPA        Pop all general registers
 BOUND        Check array index against bounds
 IMUL        Signed (integer) multiply
 INS        Input from port to string
 OUTS        Output string to port

["The Evolution of the iAPX 286", Bob Greene, Intel Corporation, PC Tech Journal, December 1984, page 134].

["The 80286 Microprocessor", Paul Wells, Intel Corporation, Byte, November 1984, p. 231].