After a burst of consolidations in autumn 1999, there are five companies which make x86 chips. I'm making comments about their financial behaviour as well as their technical behaviour, so suppose I should point out that I don't own stock in any of them.
Intel is by far the largest, and at the moment distributes the Centrino, Pentium 4, Celeron, Xeon and Itanium brands. They define the direction of the x86 market, they sell in a year more CPUs than there are people in Germany, their R&D budget is larger than the higher-education budget of any EU country, and their annual sales, at $26.6 billion, exceed the GDP of Croatia or Paraguay. Their profit in the year ending June 2002 was about 2.4 billion Euros.
AMD is considerably smaller than Intel, and, whilst at one point very competitive with them, is now being pushed into a corner on pricing. They distribute the Duron and Athlon brands, though have virtually abandoned Duron. Their Athlon CPUs are, at most moments in time, significantly cheaper than Intel CPUs of the same speed, and significantly faster than Intel CPUs of the same price; however, for most of the second half of 2002, they had nothing capable of competing with the very top of Intel's range. This changed entirely as the Opteron came out.
They sell in a year more CPUs than there are people in Canada, their annual sales, at $3.2 billion, exceed the GDP of Rwanda or Guam, and in the year ending June 2002 they lost a little over three hundred million Euros. On the other hand, with the release of the Opteron, they started makin profits.
VIA, a Taiwanese manufacturer more known for its chipsets, is focussing on building the cheapest possible x86-compatible processors, presumably with an eye on the market in Mainland China. They don't appear to account for their CPU sales separately, but it seems that they are a very small component in the global market.
Transmeta, a Californian company, focus on building the most power-efficient x86-compatible processors possible, targetting the light laptop market. They've had very serious problems with their manufacturing, and have failed to get their CPUs into products released into the non-Japanese market; whilst they used a very interesting design technique for low power, they have not been able to implement it well enough to compete with Intel's brute-force process-optimisation approach. In the year ending June 2002, they lost only slightly less than AMD; more than a million Euros per employee. The advent of Banias will knock them out of the market entirely; Linus Torvalds will have to look for a new job.
National Semiconductor produce the Geode system-on-a-chip device; I haven't seen much information about it. This product line was taken over by AMD, who have used the name both for system-on-chip devices and for what are essentially relabelled Mobile Athlons.
Cyrix, now part of VIA, used to have a commanding position at the very low end of the market with its 6x86MX and M2 chips, and the MediaGX system-on-a-chip device. The MediaGX went to National Semiconductor and turned into the Geode.
Centaur Technology, a subsidiary of IDT, developed the Winchip series of processors, which were essentially competitors to the Pentium Classic at the bottom end of the market. They're now part of VIA too.
IDT and Rise used to be contendors (Rise's mP6 chip had an interesting superpipelined design, and was second only to the K5 in RC5 decryptions per clock; also had the mildly embarrassing flaw of not working at all at 3x or 3.5x clock multipliers), but seem to have vanished in puffs of smoke once Intel's Celerons gave Intel dominance of the low-end CPU market they had hoped to enter.
IBM manufactured Cyrix-designed chips for some time, and produced their own slight modifications of them; indeed, they marketed the 6x86 as an IBM chip for a while. NexGen were going to take the x86 market by storm at one point, but didn't get there; their design team, however, did much of the work on the AMD K6. UMC manufactured some patent-infringing 486DX33-level chips in 1994; SGS-Thomson manufactured 486DX4-level chips a bit later, and may also have fabbed 6x86s.