It sold millions of units, positioning AMD as a legitimate competitor to Intel, rather than being merely a second source for x86 CPUs (then termed 8086-family).

In the following two years the AMD 386DX-40 saw popularity with small manufacturers of PC clones and with budget-minded computer enthusiasts because it offered near-80486 performance at a much lower price than an actual 486.

[5] Generally the 386DX-40 performs nearly on par with a 25 MHz 486 due to the 486 needing fewer clock cycles per instruction, thanks to its tighter pipelining (more overlapping of internal processing) in combination with an on-chip CPU cache.

Produced in 0.8 μm technology and using a static core, their clock speed could be dropped down to 0 MHz, consuming just some mWatts.

The Am386 and its low-power successors were also popular choices for embedded systems, for a much longer period than their life span as PC processors.