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>>Fundamentally, AMD is the only company outside of Intel that is capable of designing, validating, and shipping x86 microprocessors. Everyone always forgets V

>>Fundamentally, AMD is the only company outside of Intel that is capable of designing, validating, and shipping x86 microprocessors. Everyone always forgets VIA and their CPU division, Centaur Technology. The VIA Nano's are modern amd64 CPUs that perform well for their power envelope. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIA_Nano http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIA_Nano

userbinator 13y ago
At the low end, there's also this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex86 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex86 The 286(!) continues to be manufactured by Intersil: http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/CS80C286-12/CS80C286-12-ND/1060814 http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/CS80C286-12/CS80C28... 386-level cores are also found in a variety of Chinese SoCs, probably for industrial embedded applications.
- voidlogic 13y ago
  Or an open source 486! :) http://opencores.org/project,ao486 http://opencores.org/project,ao486
stephengillie 13y ago
What happened to Transmeta and their Crusoe?
- gsnedders 13y ago
  Bought by Novafora who then went bust.
- Osiris 13y ago
  I had a Crusoe based ultrabook during college (2002ish-2005). Performance wasn't fantastic, but it was a third the size or less than most people's laptops, and I could get 8-10 hours out of it. I didn't even take my power cord to school with me.
- yuhong 13y ago
  What is funny is that it integrated the northbridge into the CPU long before Intel did.
- puzzlingcaptcha 13y ago
  Transmeta also later developed Efficeon which had a number of improvements over Crusoe (Hypertransport instead of shared PCI bus for chipset interconnect, larger cache and VLIW instruction length, SSE extensions). HP used it in some of their thin clients. A few years ago I compared it to VIA C7 http://fijam.eu.org/blog/benchmarking-transmeta-efficeon/ http://fijam.eu.org/blog/benchmarking-transmeta-efficeon/
szatkus 13y ago
But they clearly gave up with x86. I heard only about some ARM parts from Via during last few years.
kjs3 13y ago
IBM & TI can also bring a microprocessor to market, and have pretty extensive experience with x86. To be fair, their last stand-alone x86 were i486 contemporaries, but it's not as though they don't understand the innovations that lead from i486 to i7 (see: Power7). If there was a market demand, either could probably produce an x86 compatible, depending on licensing issues. If you go back to 8086 and i286 then NEC & Fujitsu made x86 chips and still have formidable chip design capabilities.
dkanter 13y ago
VIA has basically been pre-empted by Intel's Atom line, which is more power efficient and higher performance. It's not that they have been forgotten, but they are still using ancient process technology...meaning uncompetitive products.

userbinator 13y ago

At the low end, there's also this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex86 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex86 The 286(!) continues to be manufactured by Intersil: http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/CS80C286-12/CS80C286-12-ND/1060814 http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/CS80C286-12/CS80C28... 386-level cores are also found in a variety of Chinese SoCs, probably for industrial embedded applications.

voidlogic 13y ago
Or an open source 486! :) http://opencores.org/project,ao486 http://opencores.org/project,ao486

stephengillie 13y ago

What happened to Transmeta and their Crusoe?

gsnedders 13y ago
Bought by Novafora who then went bust.
Osiris 13y ago
I had a Crusoe based ultrabook during college (2002ish-2005). Performance wasn't fantastic, but it was a third the size or less than most people's laptops, and I could get 8-10 hours out of it. I didn't even take my power cord to school with me.
yuhong 13y ago
What is funny is that it integrated the northbridge into the CPU long before Intel did.
puzzlingcaptcha 13y ago
Transmeta also later developed Efficeon which had a number of improvements over Crusoe (Hypertransport instead of shared PCI bus for chipset interconnect, larger cache and VLIW instruction length, SSE extensions). HP used it in some of their thin clients. A few years ago I compared it to VIA C7 http://fijam.eu.org/blog/benchmarking-transmeta-efficeon/ http://fijam.eu.org/blog/benchmarking-transmeta-efficeon/

szatkus 13y ago

But they clearly gave up with x86. I heard only about some ARM parts from Via during last few years.

kjs3 13y ago

IBM & TI can also bring a microprocessor to market, and have pretty extensive experience with x86. To be fair, their last stand-alone x86 were i486 contemporaries, but it's not as though they don't understand the innovations that lead from i486 to i7 (see: Power7). If there was a market demand, either could probably produce an x86 compatible, depending on licensing issues. If you go back to 8086 and i286 then NEC & Fujitsu made x86 chips and still have formidable chip design capabilities.

dkanter 13y ago

VIA has basically been pre-empted by Intel's Atom line, which is more power efficient and higher performance. It's not that they have been forgotten, but they are still using ancient process technology...meaning uncompetitive products.