I remember writing a cyberpunk story as a kid, in which everyone was rocking badass 786s.
(586 became Pentium, so 686 would be the Pentium Pro/II microarchitecture.)
The Athlon was solid but less reliable, various reboots and glitches. I kind have always had a preference for Intel since then.
Some of those chipsets were fine and others were less reliable or compatible. The quality of the drivers for each chipset may also have mattered.
RISC architecture is gonna change everything.
My favorite PC I ever built was a dual-CPU Tyan motherboard that eventually held two screaming fast Coppermines. Needed a university copy of Windows 2000 to really make them sing—the Windows 95 series never supported SMP—and it was glorious.
1974: Intel 8080
1978: Intel 8086
1982: Intel 80286
1985: Intel 80386
1990: Intel 8010386
1995: Intel 801040386
2005: Intel 80107045386
2025: Intel 8.010207659386e12