Most of you are no doubt familiar with Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, IBM, Texas Instruments, and possibly even VIA – but there's another precursor chipmaker you should know about: Cyrix. For the better part of a decade, Cyrix brought the world of personal computing to millions in the form of attainable budget PCs. However, the company was ultimately killed by its best product, and that chip's inability to run a popular game, followed by a disastrous merger with a larger partner.
The early 1990s was a marvelous but strange time for the desktop computing industry. Intel seemed to be winning the fierce competition in the microprocessor space; Apple had switched to IBM's PowerPC architecture, while Motorola's 68K chips were slowly dragging Commodore's Amiga PC to the grave. Arm was only a tiny flame sparked by Apple and a few others, almost entirely focused on developing a processor for the infamous Newton .
During this period, AMD was liberating its processors from the negative aura of being second-sourced from Intel. After cloning a few more generations of Intel CPUs, AMD developed its own architecture, which by the end of the nineties was well-regarded for its price and performance. This was around the same time that AMD was liberating its processors from the negative aura of being second-sourced from Intel.
After cloning a few more generations of Intel CPUs, AMD came up with its own architecture, which by the end of the nineties was well-regarded for its price and performance. That.
