The iAPX prefix originally belonged to the Intel iAPX 432 architecture, alias Intel 8800. However, as this radical design failed in the marketplace, Intel also tried it on its more conventional 8086-family of processors, mainly used as a kind of system prefix but also to denote individual processors in the family. The 8086 based line was therefore called the iAPX 86 series for a few years during the early 1980s. This was abandoned rather soon, however. The industry around the 8088- and 80286-based de facto standard of IBM PC and IBM AT designs also seldom used that naming scheme. As a result, the iAPX prefix is now, again, more closely associated with the (non-x86) iAPX 432 architecture (which, although a commercial failure, is often seen as historically important).
