That's a fair point on the SSDs, though I wonder how many of them use the same NAND chips from Micron or whoever.
Chewy also forgot Aureal and Crystal audio, though to be fair Aureal chipsets usually found themselves sold on Turtle Beach PCBs. For graphics vendors, a couple other notables would be Cirrus Logic and Tseng Labs, albeit by the time PCI came around neither was really in their golden years anymore. Conner and Miniscribe for HDDs, though as I recall both ended up folded into Maxtor? Also Quantum. I have a Bigfoot TX on a shelf -- it works fine, it's just slower than an SD card. Toshiba is still in the game in a limited capacity I think, and the best parts of Hitachi/HGST and IBM's hard disk division ended up with WD anyway.
I had forgotten about Rise, myself, I've only read about them, but thinking about it I've had some rare birds in hand indeed. I had a thin client based on the Crusoe a while back, I found it performed about 75% what an equally-clocked Deschutes or Katmai chip would do in integer and gets absolutely demolished in floating-point. My old blacktop Pentium Pro build disappointed and fascinated in the same turn in much the same fashion. Some chips I want to knock off my bucket list are the original K5, the MP6, and the Nehemiah-core Cyrix III.
VIA didn't buy Cyrix directly as I recall reading about it -- they bought National Semiconductor, who had purchased Cyrix some years before I think?
