The 8086 microprocessor was Intel's first 16-bit microprocessor released in 1978. It had several improvements over previous processors including being 16-bit instead of 8-bit, having an instruction queue to improve performance, and supporting segmented memory addressing to access more than 64KB of memory. The 8086 had a 16-bit external data bus, 20-bit address bus, and could address up to 1MB of memory. It operated at clock speeds between 5-10MHz and had around 29,000 transistors.