The Intel iAPX 432 was Intel's first 32-bit microprocessor design, introduced in 1981 as a set of three integrated circuits. The iAPX 432 was intended to be Intel's major design for the 1980s, implementing many advanced multitasking and memory management features in hardware, which led them to refer to the design as the Micromainframe. The abbreviation iAPX reportedly stands for intel Advanced Processor architecture, the X coming from the Greek letter Chi.

The iAPX 432 was originally planned to have a 10 MHz clock, but available models used 5, 7, and 8 MHz. [1] The peak performance was 2 million instructions per second. [2]

The processor's data structure support allowed modern operating systems to be implemented on it using far less program code than ordinary processors, as the 432 did much of the work in hardware. The design also directly supported object oriented programming and garbage collection and was therefore much more complex than most processors of the era, especially microprocessors.

Using the semiconductor technology of its day, Intel's engineers weren't able to translate the design into a very efficient first implementation. Along with the lack of optimization in the Ada compiler, this contributed to rather slow but expensive computer systems, performing typical benchmarks at roughly 1/4 the speed of the new 80286 chip at the same clock frequency. This initial performance gap was probably the main reason why Intel's plan to replace the 8086-line (or x86 architecture) with the iAPX 432 failed.