If you're talking installed base, maybe. However if you're takling
new unit sales AMD bottomed out at about 4% just before teh release of
the K6 (early '97).
Just before the release of the K6 Cyrix was actually outselling AMD
(at least if you count the Cyrix branded and IBM branded chips
together).
The first Centaur Winchip came out in Oct. '97 according to
www.sandpile.org. At some point i think they might have managed to
creep over 1% of sales around early '99 or there abouts. I rather
liked this chip, VERY simple and cheap but offered not altogether
terrible performance for the time.
The Winchip design is essentially still around in the form of the VIA
C-series chips, though obviously they've diverged quite a bit since
VIA bought 'em out many moons ago.
I'm not sure that Rise ever really sold any meaningful quantities of
chips.
None of the alternatives ever matched Intel in terms of performance,
and they only matched or beat AMD at times when AMD was really
struggling (ie the K5 days). Cyrix and the IDT/Centaur/Winchip both
got bought out by VIA and that's the only real 3rd player left in x86
chips, but they're really targetting some specific niches. They still
have the VERY low cost design from Winchip so apparently they might
still be making money with their 1% marketshare, but that's about it.
Transmeta's design was a really odd-ball way of doing things that had
a lot of people scratching their heads from the get-go. I don't think
I went so far as to say that it wouldn't work out well, but I
definitely didn't have very high hopes for their idea. It turns out
that my low hopes were overly optimistic. It was just an odd-ball way
of doing things, it was a REALLY bad way of doing things! At best
they were matching the performance of VIA chips while using 4x as many
transistors and costing at least 4x as much to build!
Transmeta now seems to have taken the Rambus approach to business and
have stopped concentrating on engineering in order to focus their
efforts on litigation and questionable patents.
The Winchip-2 was a K6 equal but two years too late! By the time IDT
had much volume of their 200MHz Winchip, AMD was selling their 350MHz
K6-2. Even then the Winchip2 could only match the performance of the
K6 on integer workloads, the floating point performance was weaker
than the already so-so K6 FP.
I did like the design of the chip because it was SO cheap. It was
kind of elegant in it's simplicity, but it was never anywhere close to
the performance level that AMD or Intel offered at the time. What it
DID offer was a really good low-cost part that was a drop-in
replacement for MANY old motherboards. At they were selling this chip
there were lots of people with older Pentium 75-133MHz boards that
could drop one of these Winchips in for a VERY noticeable improvement
in performance for only ~$50. It was an EXCELLENT deal for these
people and I recommended it highly for this exact reason. However for
anyone building a new system from scratch it made no sense at all.
Only a few dollars more got you an AMD K6-2 or Intel Celeron (which
had cache by this time) based system with MUCH better performance.
AMD, like Intel, highered several old Alpha guys.
Speed increases haven't actually slowed down that much, though they
aren't necessarily as obvious anymore because most chips are "fast
enough" for so many applications. However if you look at a plot of
something like SPEC CPU2000 (and especially CPU_rate) vs. time you'll
see that the performance is still doubling every 24 months or so.
Pretty impressive.
I'm glad I don't share your pessimism for computer chip development! I
still expect noticeable performance improvements for at least another
5-10 years. Beyond that it's too tough to predict, however you can
bet that both AMD and Intel aren't going to just back and give up on
things. New performance improvements might not come from the same
sorts of obvious ways that we have seen in the past, but they aren't
going to stop.
