NexGen was a private semiconductor company that designed x86 microprocessors until it was purchased by AMD in 1996. Like competitor Cyrix, NexGen was a fabless design house that designed its chips but relied on other companies for production. NexGen's chips were produced by IBM's Microelectronics division. The company was best known for the unique implementation of the x86 architecture in its processors. NexGen's CPUs were designed much differently than other processors based on the x86 instruction set at the time: the processor would translate code designed to run on the traditionally... CISC-based x86 architecture to run on the chip's internal RISC architecture. The architecture was used in later AMD chips such as the K6, and to an extent most x86 processors today implement a "hybrid" architecture similar to those used in NexGen's processors. The company was founded in 1986 by Thampy Thomas, being funded by Compaq, ASCII and Kleiner Perkins. Its first design was targeted at the 80386 generation of processors.
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