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Comment by voidlogic | Hacker News Reader

>>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

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At the low end, there's also this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex86

The 286(!) continues to be manufactured by Intersil: 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.

Or an open source 486! :)

http://opencores.org/project,ao486

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

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.

What happened to Transmeta and their Crusoe?

Bought by Novafora who then went bust.

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.

What is funny is that it integrated the northbridge into the CPU long before Intel did.

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/

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.

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