"The Saga of the X86 Clone Wars"
Those who are well-informed about the microprocessor business
should notice I based this story on kernels of truth or rumors,
and all the names written are distortions of real people and companies.
Eg, anyone who has seen AMD's former management circle will know that
the story's surgically-altered Xander doubles has some truth to it.
I was inspired to write it after reading the story by Robert Collins (below).
To light the story's background, Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, & Andrew Grove
were the brilliant scientists who envisioned fabricating a processor on
a silicon chip: the "microprocessor". They worked at Fairchild and left
to found Intel. Jerry Sanders (he's truly brave), was a colleague of those three.
Noyce lent seed money to Sanders to found AMD, which almost became
a "seed of destruction", since AMD grew to be the sole competitor against Intel.
Many other companies tried to compete against Intel, but only AMD
has survived and won battles in the "x86 clone wars". The "rebel heroes"
in my story are real people who worked in those other companies.
AMD attempted to design its own x86 ("K5") but had little success.
Sanders made the controversial decision to pay nearly one billion dollars
to buy a tiny startup company called NexGen. The NexGen team, with an
infusion of ex-engineers from DEC's Alpha team, developed the K7,
better known as the Athlon. In a funny twist of irony, apparently
Microsoft pressured Intel to make the Pentium EM64T which is compatible
with AMD's x86 64-bit extensions, so the originator imitates its imitator.