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History of Atiq Raza, CEO NexGen (from: http://www.digital-daily.com/editorial/nexgen-history/)
No wonder that the "continental" line went through the Raza's career in the USA. And in 1988 his acquaintance, Rajvir Singh, suggested he work for a newly created Indian
startup called NexGen founded by Thampy Thomas and financed by Compaq and ASCII (there was about 20-30% of Indians and Pakistanis among the engineers). Thomas had a
trivial plan - to make clones of Intel's i836 and PCs around it. That was a real adventure - as Vinod Khosla from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers recalls later -
when that investment company joined financing NexGen in 1990 (right at the time when Raza became CEO), they even lacked for money for current weekly payments.
NexGen had no agreements with Intel, that is why, in contrast to pirates from AMD, they had to build up the processor from the very beginning. The work took 7 years,
and the first announced in 1994 solution was fairly interesting. It was really fully compatible with the i386 in the instructions, but its microarchitecture outshined
even the 486 and resembled more the Pentium which just appeared on the shelves.
Those 7 years were very fruitful - although the engineers didn't keep within the established terms, the Nx586 was the first, after Pentium, superscaler processor,
i.e. it was able to process more than one instruction at a clock.
In 1995, executives from AMD and NexGen first met and discussed a common dream: to create a family of microprocessors that would return competition to the marketplace.
These meetings led to AMD acquiring NexGen in 1996.
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