X86 Assembly/Programmable Interrupt Controller

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The original IBM PC contained a chip known as the Programmable Interrupt Controller to handle the incoming interrupt requests from the system, and to send them in an orderly fashion to the MPU for processing. The original interrupt controller was the 8259-A chip, although modern computers will have a more modern variant. The most common replacement is the APIC (Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller) which is essentially an extended version of the old PIC chip to maintain backwards compatibility.