NEC V20 Processor / CPU
8 MHz
Pin-compatible replacement for Intel 8088

In the early days of PC-compatibles, before we started building our own brand of PCs, we sold Leading Edge computers. We replaced the 8088 processor with a V20 and advertised that our Leading Edge computers were faster than those sold by our competitors. We could prove our claim easily with benchmarking software. Not neck-snapping faster, but about 5% faster, which was enough to give us a competitive advantage. It was simply a matter of switching processors, which could not have been easier. We never revealed how we made our models faster. This was in the earliest days of microcomputers/PCs and no one, including our competitors, had a clue what was going on.