This FAQ is about the more modern chips built to implement the 32-bit x86 instruction set. The x86 instruction set was developed by Intel over more than 20 years (the 8086 processor appeared on June 8th 1978), though the 32-bit version which is now standard first appeared in the 80386 released in October 1985.
There is no new research in this FAQ, but the information came from several sources, and I hope I've presented it in a more convenient form than the originals.
There are a couple of arbitrary restrictions I've put on; to avoid having to clutter up the timeline with pages and pages on the variants of the 386 and 486, I've assumed everything began with the 60MHz Intel Pentium in 1993, and that the competitors to Intel produced nothing before their chips designed to compete with the Pentium.
The main meat of this page is the timeline showing who was producing which chips when; you may consider the rest of the page as a dictionary to let you understand the timeline, or as an introduction to the terminology used to describe x86 systems.