[dspillett]

> I'm guessing that was a 286.

It is, yes. I meant to mention that detail!

> The 386 (and later) had to be reverse engineered … That also meant AMD was a bit late to the game

There were also legal matters that delayed the release of their chips. Intel tried to claim breach of copyright with the 80386 name¹ and so forth, to try stymie the competition.

> they were able to achieve better performance.

A lot of that came from clocking them faster. I had an SX running at 40Hz. IIRC they were lower power for the same clock then Intel parts, able to run at 3.3V, which made them popular in laptops of the time. That, and they were cheaper! Intel came out with a 3.3V model that had better support for cache to compete with this.

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[1] This failed, which is part of why the i386 (and later i486 and number-free names like Pentium) branding started (though only in part - starting to market direct to consumers rather than just EOMs was a significant factor in that too).