Correction: France and the UK have them.

Right NexGen released their chip first but it is hard to compare because it was a dual-chip solution where the FPU came in a separate package while the K5 had its own FPU. NexGen only did a single-chip product later. K5 development process was highly protracted and difficult and the release was delayed many times. The Cyrix 5x86 was also similar in a lot of regards to the Pentium Pro. In fact I remember the Pentium Pro designer himself stating that they had a lot of interesting insights during Pentium Pro chip design after doing low-level reverse engineering of a Cyrix processor.

After AMD lost the license to manufacture Intel i486 processors, together with other people, they were forced to design their own chip from the ground up. So they basically used one of the 29k RISC processors and put an x86 frontend on it. Cyrix did more or less the same thing at the time also coming with their own design. Since the K5 had good performance per clock but could not clock very high and was expensive AMD was stuck and to get their next processor they bought a company called NexGen which designed the Nx586 processor which was Intel compatible. AMD then worked on the successor of Nx586 as a single chip which was the K6. The K7 Athlon was yet another design made by a team headed by Dirk Meyer who used to be a chip designer at Digital Equipment Incorporated i.e. DEC. He was one of the designers of the Alpha series of RISC CPUs and the Athlon resembles an Alpha chip internally a lot because of that.

Actually AMD did that way back in the K5 time. The K5 was a 29k RISC processor with a x86 frontend.

Here more:
http://uk.reuters.com/article/...

Japanese companies export about 500 billion yen (3.16 billion pounds) of auto parts to the EU every year and are charged about 3-4.5 percent in tariffs by the EU, according to the business daily.

The EU offered a 90 percent tariff elimination except the 10 percent duty on automobiles and 14 percent on LCD televisions, according to the newspaper.

That is complete nonsense, there never was any protective law to prevent car imports. It would be against any "fair trade" agreement anyway.

Typical German delusion. The truth is free trade for you, concede in things like apparel, footwear and other things you scarcely manufacture in the first place and screw anyone trying to get into your automotive and machine tool markets.

http://www.autonews.com/articl...
http://europe.autonews.com/art...

First it was the informal quotas - 'voluntary' agreements that lasted for decades and kept Japanese car sales in western Europe capped at 10 to 15 percent of the market.

In other words the Japanese had their sales capped at 10 to 15% of the market in Europe for years.

When they built UK transplants in the late 1980s and early 1990s their share seemed certain to grow. Who knew that the pound would strengthen and that Britain would weaken as an industrial base?

In other words the Japanese were then FORCED to build plants in the EU to be able to sell cars in the EU.

Then there are the tricks companies like Volkswagen play in the European market. Where they finance car sales via their own bank which has lower interest rates than the rest of the Eurozone and can do this without currency transfers or bank transfer fees like an Asian manufacturer would need to do. In other words they sales are being inflated by German interest rates.

German car sales are no miracle. If the protections came down their sales would come down as well.

http://www.globalpost.com/disp...

During the five-day talks -- a key session before the European Union's review in April of whether Tokyo has made progress in eliminating trade barriers -- abolition of EU tariffs on Japanese automobiles was also a main topic of discussion.

The review, a year after the negotiations began, will be conducted to decide whether to continue the free trade talks based on how much effort Japan has made to eliminate nontariff barriers, especially in the railway sector.

The two sides agreed earlier to exchange proposals on scrapping or lowering tariffs at an early date. A senior Japanese government official has said that they were striving to exchange offers by April.

Japan, which wants to expand its auto exports to the European Union, plans to propose scrapping tariffs on EU wine in stages so it can draw a concession from the 28-country bloc in the automobile sector.

There are tons of real problems to solve like access to energy and sanitation and global warming expenditures often only make those harder and more expensive.

The problem in my point of view is that the Linux desktop infrastructure is way outdated in architectural terms.

Renewables are highly variable and you need backup peaking power plant capacity including natural gas fired power plants and hydroelectric to cover production shortfalls which you would otherwise not require if you were using a baseload plant be it coal or nuclear. Coal and nuclear power plants cannot ramp electric production up or down quickly to cover renewable shortfalls.

You are deluding yourself if you think part of the German industry is not being lost to places like China. Just ask Grundig, Telefunken, Krups, how well their businesses are going. As for automobiles currently the German industry is safe in Europe thanks a lot of protectionist laws preventing car imports which were originally designed to prevent competition by Japanese car manufacturers. Even then the Chinese will not be happy just with importing vehicles from Germany forever, while the Japanese already control most of the US car market.

Just because there is more US coal in the market the worldwide coal prices go down regardless if it is all being bought by Germany or not.

The 45.8% electricity generated from coal is the average over an entire semester. Yes there will be some days where wind and solar give you 50%. There will also be other days where it gives zilch. On average, in a semester, solar and wind generated 17.1% of total electricity requirements.

6.3% of electricity in Germany is being generated using natural gas. So while the numbers are low it is not zero. In fact the more variable generators like wind and solar you have in a system the more backup hydroelectric and natural gas fired power plant backup peaking plant capacity you require in a grid.

The absolute capacity of coal power production is dropping slightly but the total electric production dropped as well as industry moves to China and elsewhere. The fact is the coal power production is more or less stable and ready to increase in the middle term

The major reason for the large capital expenditure of nuclear power is that a lot of reactors are quite large and need expensive containment. There are proposals to build modular reactors which would address this problem like the South African Pebble Bed Modular Reactor. The Chinese also have some projects like that.

Hydropower also is a large capital expenditure generation method and just like nuclear it ends up being cheap in the long run.

Nuclear fuel prices are going to crash down even further as centrifuge separation becomes commonplace while the maintenance costs are also much less with increased plant automation requiring much less people to operate the plant.

Europe? We are going to be paying for the windmill overconstruction for the next 20 years with guaranteed profit contracts for generated power regardless if it is required or not.

German steel producers have already said they will move elsewhere if the electric power prices don't come back down again. It is uncompetitive to manufacture steel in Germany at current prices.

So a significant part of the cheap power price is also natural gas, which is most decidedly not renewable and not zero-CO2.

Things are a lot worse than you think. The fact is the electric power prices went down in Germany because coal prices are down. Why are they down? The US has a natural gas glut and has been exporting the excess coal, which is not required anymore, to countries like Germany.

Germany has been trying to get off natural gas because the major supplier to Central Europe is Russia and you know how they are. *cough* Ukraine *cough*.

The Wind and Solar are window dressing. Coal is used to generate 45.8% of the electricity used in Germany while Wind and Solar combined are 17.1%. As Germany is winding down its Nuclear power plants they are building new Coal power plants to replace them.

If the trend continues the US will actually reduce its CO2 emissions in the next decade while countries in Europe like Germany will increase CO2 emissions. If you care about that.

http://www.world-nuclear-news....
http://www.world-nuclear-news....

The article claims it is expected to start operating this year. Construction started in 2009. So if they can do it it will begin operations 5 years after construction start which is quite good time for a novel design.