I'm curious as to which company makes the best economical processor yet is still able to maintain performance. So far the only ones I really know of are the Via C7, Transmeta Efficeon and AMD''s Geode processors, which AMD had gotten after buying over National Semiconductor, who had launched the Geode series of processors back in 1999. The Geode core itself was derived from the MediaGX processors made by Cyrix, which had later on merged with National Semiconductor in 1997 before being sold to Via, which had chosen to use the CPU design developed by Centaur Technology founded by IDT the makers of the WinChip over the designed CPU technology developed by Cyrix. Via had named this chip the "Cyrix III" because Via believed that Cyrix had better name recognition then Centaur. Transmeta was founded in 1995 by Bob Cmelik, Dave Ditzel, and 6 others as a US based corporation that designs VLIW code morphing microprocessors. Transmeta had even employed industry luminaries such as Linus Torvalds who left in 2003 to continue developing the Linux Kernel and Dave Taylor a Game Programmer who had formerly worked at Id Software and promoted gaming on Linux.