The document discusses the architecture of the 8086 microprocessor. It introduces the major components of the 8086 including the Bus Interface Unit (BIU) which connects to memory and I/O devices, the Instruction Queue (IQ) which buffers instructions, the Control Unit which directs operation, and the Execution Unit (EU) containing the Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) for performing calculations. A key feature of the 8086 was that it supported pipelining to improve performance by splitting processing between the BIU and EU stages.