Intel's Competitors

Competitors have moved away from simply making clones of the Intel processors. They are currently designing their own processors with unique features. AMD and Cyrix are among the best known. Until recently, all the Intel processors had been based on a CISC (complex instruction set computing) architecture. Processors based on RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) have been used in high-powered machines since the mid-1980s. Intel has produced its own version of a RISC-based processor that uses a much smaller and simpler set of instructions, greatly enhancing the speed of the processor.