The Amstrad/Schneider PC-1640 was the successor of the successful PC-1512. The PC-1640 came standard with 640kByte of RAM and a 20 or 30 MByte Hard Drive. The graphics capabilities on the PC-1640 were upgraded to EGA standard, the PC-1512 had enhanced CGA compatibility.

Just as the PC-1512, the power supply was housed in the monitor with a 14-pin plug going from the monitor to the base unit. Many peripheral interface boards were hard-wired on the main board, including serial and parallel interfaces and the disk controller. An area of RAM was set aside, called NVR (non-volatile RAM), which was battery-backed (AA batteries!!) and stored configuration data of the machine. This also stored the real-time clock.

The PC-1640 had an ISA slot that could be used for a 3rd party graphics card. The internal graphics could, unlike the PC-1512, be disabled, but in practice not many users chose to do this, since the machine still needed the old monitor for the power supply of the computer. So if the new graphics card modes were not supported by the original monitor, your choice was to sit with two monitors on your desk, or not upgrade at all.

Just as the PC-1512 the PC-1640 came bundled with DR-DOS. MS-DOS was not included on this computer because the price-point was too high for Amstrad. Digital Research took this as a chance to promote their version of DOS and offered DR-DOS at a very aggressive price point to Amstrad.

The 8086 CPU from Intel is a 16-bit microprocessor and was designed between 1976 and 1978. The 8086 is the foundation of the x86 cpu architecture which is Intel's most successful line of processors.

The 8086 used the same microarchitecture as the 8-bit 8008, the 8080, and the 8085. This allowed assembly language programs to run seamlesly on the 8086. New instructions and features were added and the bus structure was designed to allow for collaboration with co-processors, such as the 8087 that was released later.