The Intel 8086 is a 16-bit microprocessor that can access up to 1 MB of memory. It has a 20-bit address bus and supports 64K I/O ports. The 8086 has two main units - the Bus Interface Unit (BIU) and the Execution Unit (EU). The BIU handles fetching instructions from memory and performing bus operations, while the EU decodes and executes instructions. The 8086 uses a segmented memory architecture with four segment registers - code, data, extra, and stack - to access the 1 MB address space.