VIA used to make low power x86 processors

Fun fact. The idea of strong national security is the reason why there are three companies with access to the x86 ISA.

DoD originally required all products to be sourced by at least three companies to prevent supply chain issues. This required Intel to allow AMD and VIA to produce products based on ISA.

For me this is good indicator if someone that talks about good national security knows what they are talking about or are just spewing bullshit and playing national security theatre.

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rasz 4 days ago | parent [-]

Intel didnt "allow" VIA anything :). Via acquired x86 tech from IDT (WinChip Centaur garbage) in a fire sale. IDT didnt ask anyone about any licenses, neither did Cyrix, NextGen, Transmeta, Rise nor NEC.

Afaik DoD wasnt the reason behind original AMD second source license, it was IBM forcing Intel on chips that went into first PC.

	▲	cheema33 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		This.

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pavlov 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

And Transmeta…

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DeepYogurt 4 days ago | parent [-]

Transmeta wasn't x86 internally but decoded x86 instructions. Retrobytes did a history of transmeta not too long ago and the idea was essentially to be able to be compatible with any cpu uarch. Alas by the time it shipped only x86 was relevant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2aQTJDJwd8

	▲	tyfighter 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Actually, the reason Transmeta CPUs were so slow was that they didn't have an x86 instruction hardware decoder. Every code cache (IIRC it was only 32 MB) miss resulted in a micro-architectural trap which translated x86 instructions to the underlying uops in software.