The 80186 is a microprocessor

The 80186 is a microprocessor that was developed by Intel circa 1982. The 80186 was an improvement on the Intel 8086 and Intel 8088. As with the 8086, it had a 16-bit external bus and was also available as the Intel 80188, with an 8-bit external data bus. The initial clock rate of the 80186 and 80188 was 6 MHz, but due to more hardware (in place of microcode) some of the individual instructions ran 10-20 times faster than on an 8086 at the same clock frequency. On the average, it ran at 1 million instructions per second.

They were generally used as embedded processors (roughly comparable to microcontrollers). They were not used in many personal computers, but there were some notable exceptions: the Wang Office Assistant, marketed as a pc-like stand-alone word processor which used a subset of their WP Plus word processing program; the Mindset; the Siemens PC-D (Siemens' first DOS PC line, which ran MS-DOS v2.11 even though their hardware was not 100% IBM PC-compatible); the Compis (a Swedish school computer); the RM Nimbus (a British school computer); the Unisys ICON (a Canadian school computer); ORB Computer by ABS; the HP 200lx; the Tandy 2000 desktop (a somewhat PC-compatible workstation featuring particularly sharp graphics for its day); and the Philips :YES. Another British computer manufacturer, Acorn, created a plug-in second processor that contained the 80188 chip along with assorted support chips and 512 KB of RAM – hence the Master 512 system.

One major function of the 80186/80188 series was to reduce the number of chips required by including features such as a DMA controller, interrupt controller, timers, and chip select logic.