 Begun in 1985, the company's first project, a SPARC-based ECL gate-array processor, was supplanted in 1989 by Lightning, a CMOS design backed by funding and IC-design resources from Hyundai.But the division of labor between the two companies proved stormy, and in 1991 Lightning was discharged, creating Thunder—a 0.8-micrometre three-chip processor designed entirely by Metaflow.In 1995, the company successfully demonstrated an 80-MHz Thunder processor—which delivered 2.5 SPECint92/MHz—just as Hyundai decided it wanted x86-based processors instead of SPARCs.