There was NexGen around 1990, which was bought by AMD and ended up providing the base for AMD's further products. Transmeta released two x86 CPUs a bit after 2

There was NexGen around 1990, which was bought by AMD and ended up providing the base for AMD's further products. Transmeta released two x86 CPUs a bit after 2000, which ended up being technological failures. Cyrix released some budget CPUs in the 1990s but had legal issues and ran into financial trouble, eventually ending up as part of VIA. Centaur Technology developed some CPUs in the 2000s, and eventually became VIA's x86 division. They released efficient low-cost processors, which were reasonably successful on the embedded market. VIA is still around, but doesn't bring out a lot of new products. I think most of them were killed mostly by the dotcom bubble, and CPUs getting increasingly complex. The market just shifted beneath them. It is rarely a matter of just giving up.