Re: CISC vs RISC concepts -- from an assembly view

In the late 1970s and early '80s, IBM decided to use Intel chips in
their first PCs, mostly because Intel agreed to allow other vendors (AMD
and Cyrix/VIA)

AFAIK Cyrix started with designing FPUs as optional processing units
and never was a manufacturer at all but a chip design corporation
instead. VIA started later as a chipset manufacturer, so it was not an
option in the early 80s as well.

In the 80s, there were only AMD and NEC which produced x86 compatible
CPUs using the original intel designs. NEC had made some
pin-compatible optimizations for the 8086 family called V20 and V30,
which were somewaht faster and could be used as direct 8088/8086
replacements. AMD did not design its own x86 chips until the 32bit
machines came up (afair, they started to split from intel beginning
with some 486 design).

And IIRC, it was the other way round: Intel was not giving its design
away until they had a demand created by the IBM PC which they could
not serve on its own after it started beeing successful.

.

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