Comment by WaitWaitWha 2 hours ago
If I recall correctly, they were also licensed to produce some clones.
I remember when in the early 90s the am386-40MHz came out. Everyone was freaking out how we are now breaking the sound barrier. There was a company Twinhead(?) that came out with these 386-40Mhz motherboards with buses so overclocked most video cards would fry. Only the mono Hercules cards could survive. We thought our servers were the shizzle.
> "In the summer of 1973, during their last day working at Xerox, Ashawna Hailey, Kim Hailey, and Jay Kumar took detailed photos of an Intel 8080 pre-production sample"
I was interested in this and followed the links to the original interview at: https://web.archive.org/web/20131111155525/http://silicongen... which was interesting:
> "Xerox being more of a theoretical company than a practical one let us spend a whole year taking apart all of the different microprocessors on the market at that time and reverse engineering them back to schematic. And the final thing that I did as a project was to, we had gotten a pre-production sample of the Intel 8080 and this was just as Kim and I were leaving the company. On the last day I took the part in and shot ten rolls of color film on the Leica that was attached to the lights microscope and then they gave us the exit interview and we went on our way. And so that summer we got a big piece of cardboard from the, a refrigerator came in and made this mosaic of the 8080. It was about 300 or 400 pictures altogether and we pieced it together, traced out all the logic and the transistors and everything and then decided to go to, go up North to Silicon Valley and see if there was anybody up there that wanted to know about that kind of technology. And I went to AMI and they said oh, we're interested, you come on as a consultant, but nobody seemed to be able to take the project seriously. And then I went over to a little company called Advanced Micro Devices and they wanted to, they thought they'd like to get into it because they had just developed an N-channel process and this was '73. And I asked them if they wanted to get into the microprocessor business because I had schematics and logic diagrams to the Intel 8080 and they said yes."
From today's perspective, just shopping a design lifted directly from Intel CPU die shots around to valley semi companies sounds quite remarkable but it was a very different time then.
That wasn't the first time they had similar products out-speeding Intel. I have the CPU from the first PC I owned tacked to the front of my current main PC with a Ryzen. That was clocked at 20MHz IIRC (I'm at parental home ATM so can't confirm) where the Intel units topped out at 12MHz (unless overclocked, or course).