Muzosi, Re: "depends on your definition of what few is but my other examples are motorola(68k), ibm(ppc), texas instruments(various dsp architectures), arm(arm isa), mips (mips) etc. if forced i am sure i can come up with more."
That's fine, but in my opinion, I think there is also a lot to be said for a company that can take an existing design, and make it a lot better. It's what made Japan become a 1st world country after WWII. In terms of semiconductor manufacturers, AMD has made x86 better with the Athlon, and soon the Hammer. Intel invented x86, but they are also continuing to improve upon it with Pentium 4 (and with features such as Hyperthreading). Now Intel is doing the same with X-Scale, and has made it a vast improvement over the previous ARM core that Intel received from Digital. StrongARM was already leading the industry in terms of performance and power, and X-Scale puts Intel well into the lead. I consider that fairly impressive, even though Intel was given the design to start out.
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