NEC V20


The NEC V20 was a processor made by NEC that was a reverse-engineered, pin-compatible version of the Intel 8088 with an instruction set compatible with the Intel 80186. The V20 was introduced in 1982, and the V30 debuted in 1983.
The chip featured much more than the 29,000 transistors of the simpler 8088 CPU, ran at 5 to 10 MHz.

Features

An unusual feature was the existence of several families of unique instructions. The ADD4S, SUB4S, and CMP4S instructions were able to add, subtract, and compare huge packed binary-coded decimal numbers stored in memory. Instructions ROL4 and ROR4 rotate four-bit nibbles. Another family consisted of the TEST1, SET1, CLR1, and NOT1 instructions, which test, set, clear, and invert single bits of their operands, but are far less efficient than the later i80386 equivalents BT, BTS, BTR, and BTC; neither are their encodings compatible. There were two instructions to extract and insert bit fields of arbitrary lengths. And finally, there were two additional repeat prefixes, REPC and REPNC, which amended the original REPE and REPNE instructions and allowed a string of bytes or words to be scanned while a less or not less condition remained true.

Variants and successors