 | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computer |
| Founded | 1989 in Corvallis, Oregon |
| Defunct | 2005 |
| Fate | Dissolution |
Number of employees | 70 (1997) |
Evergreen Technologies, Inc., was a privately owned computer company active from 1989 to 2005 that manufactured a wide variety CPU upgrade chips for x86-based personal computers. [1] Based in Corvallis, Oregon, the company enjoyed a heyday in the 1990s, becoming a market leader in the CPU upgrade segment. [2] : 80
Evergreen Technologies was founded in 1989 by Kenneth "Mike" Magee in Corvallis, Oregon. [3] [2] : 80 Before founding Evergreen, Magee previously worked as vice president of Software Support Services, a Corvallis-based software vendor; he had also previously founded M.S. Systems, Inc., a computer store in Corvallis. [4] [5] : C1 The company's first product, a CPU upgrade module that allowed motherboards with Intel 80286 processors to be upgraded to i386 processors, first shipped in May 1990. In 1992, Evergreen introduced the 486 SuperChip, a CPU upgrade module featuring Cyrix's Cx486 processor that allowed 286-class machines to achieve close to i486-level performance. [6] Evergreen later signed a contract with IBM allowing the latter to capitalize on Evergreen's patents and circuit-board layouts for their 486 upgrade modules, in 1994. [7]
At their heyday in the 1990s, Evergreen's largest competitors included Intel themselves, with their i486 and Pentium OverDrive chips, and Kingston Technology, with their TurboChip. [2] : 76 Sales in Evergreen's upgrade modules grew 159-fold between 1993 and 1998; [3] the company sold roughly 40 percent of their products to international buyers. [4] : C1 By mid-1997, Evergreen had expanded to possess four buildings in Corvallis, a manufacturing plant in Portland, Oregon, a sales office in New York City and a regional office in Swindon, England. [4] : C1 Between all locations, the company employed roughly 70 workers in that year. [4] : C1–C2
In early 1999, the company introduced the AcceleraPCI (codenamed the EclipsePCI), an upgrade expansion card allowing motherboards with the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus—with processors ranging from late-model DX4s to Pentiums to Pentium Pros—to be outfit with P6-based Celeron processors. [8] [9] Development of the AcceleraPCI was Evergreen's most expensive undertaking to date and was highly publicized in the tech press. [3] [8]
Evergreen went defunct in 2005. [10]
The Cyrix 6x86 is a line of sixth-generation, 32-bit x86 microprocessors designed and released by Cyrix in 1995. Cyrix, being a fabless company, had the chips manufactured by IBM and SGS-Thomson. The 6x86 was made as a direct competitor to Intel's Pentium microprocessor line, and was pin compatible. During the 6x86's development, the majority of applications performed almost entirely integer operations. The designers foresaw that future applications would most likely maintain this instruction focus. So, to optimize the chip's performance for what they believed to be the most likely application of the CPU, the integer execution resources received most of the transistor budget. This would later prove to be a strategic mistake, as the popularity of the P5 Pentium caused many software developers to hand-optimize code in assembly language, to take advantage of the P5 Pentium's tightly pipelined and lower latency FPU. For example, the highly anticipated first-person shooter Quake used highly optimized assembly code designed almost entirely around the P5 Pentium's FPU. As a result, the P5 Pentium significantly outperformed other CPUs in the game.
The Intel 486, officially named i486 and also known as 80486, is a microprocessor. It is a higher-performance follow-up to the Intel 386. The i486 was introduced in 1989. It represents the fourth generation of binary compatible CPUs following the 8086 of 1978, the Intel 80286 of 1982, and 1985's i386.
The i486SX was a microprocessor originally released by Intel in 1991. It was a modified Intel i486DX microprocessor with its floating-point unit (FPU) disabled. It was intended as a lower-cost CPU for use in low-end systems - selling for $258 -, adapting the SX suffix of the earlier i386SX in order to connote a lower-cost option. However, unlike the i386SX, which had a 16-bit external data bus and a 24-bit external address bus, the i486SX was entirely 32-bit.
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NexGen, Inc. was a private semiconductor company based in Milpitas, California, that designed x86 microprocessors until it was purchased by AMD in 1996. 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 in Burlington, Vermont alongside PowerPC and DRAM parts.
The MediaGX CPU is an x86-compatible processor that was designed by Cyrix and manufactured by National Semiconductor following the two companies' merger. It was introduced in 1997. The core is based on the integration of the Cyrix Cx5x86 CPU core with hardware to process video and audio output. Following the buyout of Cyrix by National Semiconductor and the sale of the Cyrix name and trademarks to VIA Technologies, the core was developed by National Semiconductor into the Geode line of processors, which was subsequently sold to Advanced Micro Devices.
ETX, standing for Embedded Technology eXtended, is an integrated and compact 95 × 125 mm (3.7 × 4.9 in) computer-on-module (COM) form factor, which can be used in a design application much like an integrated circuit component. Each ETX COM integrates core CPU and memory functionality, the common I/O of a PC/AT, USB, audio, graphics, and Ethernet. All I/O signals as well as a full implementation of ISA and PCI buses are mapped to four high-density, low-profile connectors on the bottom side of the module.
Reply Corporation, often shortened to Reply Corp., was an American computer company based in San Jose, California. Founded in 1988 by Steve Petracca, the company licensed the Micro Channel architecture from IBM for their own computers released in 1989, competing against IBM's PS/2 line. The company later divested from offering complete systems in favor of marketing motherboard upgrades for older PS/2s. Reply enjoyed a close relationship with IBM, owing to many of its founding employees, including Petracca, having worked for IBM. The company was acquired by Radius in 1997.
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