Intel's victims: Eight would-be giant killers | ZDNet

▤ Summary

Since Intel introduced the 4004 microprocessor nearly 40 years ago, the company has grown into the worlds largest processor maker with a monopoly in the desktop and an overwhelming presence in servers and supercomputers. Starting with the 8086 — the chip IBM chose for its 1981 industry-defining PC — Intel has defined the industry. Such a target has attracted a lot of fiesty competition, large and small. Complex, unreliable and unpopular, it eventually transmuted to an embedded processor and quietly vanished. In the late 1990s, Nat Semi bought fellow chipmaker Cyrix and produced the Geode low-power x86 part, then lost huge amounts of money and sold Cyrix to Via just before 2000.

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