Did a lot of AMOS too when I was in high school. We made a nice platform game with two friends and released it as shareware. Lots of small experiments too, including some attempts at adventure games. :)
Were some companies acquired multiple times the same year, or is there a bug somewhere? (RazorFish is listed 3 times in 2002, DoubleClick and Skype twice in 2005, Getty Images twice in 2008, Sterling Commerce twice in 2009.)
They're meant to differentiate their CPUs, and find a good use for the billions of transistors that their process technology allows them to include in their designs. So the question is, what's better: more cache, more cores (diminishing returns after 4), or a specialized accelerator for 3D, video and generic heavily parallel computations (GPGPU)?