The "History of Overclocking" from Atomicmpc.com.au is pretty good resource to understand history of CPU back to 80386 and 80486. The article did included background of obsolete CPU company like Cyrix.
History of Overclocking Part One
History of Overclocking Part Two
The K6 has an interesting history – unsatisfied by its own designs, AMD purchased a company called NexGen, that was developing a chip called the Nx686 at the time. As a result AMD got access to Vinod Dahm, the designer of the original Pentium who had moved to NexGen. AMD changed the design so it would fit Socket 7, included MMX support, and shipped the result. Eventually the PR ratings AMD used were dropped when it started matching the actual MHz of the CPUs. The last ever K6 used Super Socket 7, giving it access to a 100MHz bus. This is the first time AMD used a different socket to Intel, even though it was backwards compatible with other Socket 7 chips. It was a stop-gap solution to up the FSB while AMD was designing Slot A, as it no longer had rights to Intel’s sockets. This worked to AMD’s advantage – those who invested in a Super Socket 7 board had compatibility with both the upcoming K6-2 and K6-III.
Cyrix does get a mention in our little history for implementing the 75MHz bus on its 6x86 and 6x86MX processors. This meant the PCI bus ran at 37.5MHz, which caused problems with some add-in cards. Cyrix caused even more problems in 1998 when it upped the speed of its MII chip to 83MHz, forcing a completely unreasonable 41.5MHz on PCI. As a result things were unstable, particularly IDE controllers.
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