Original board members included Dr. Ross and well-known figures as Dr. T. J. Rodgers of Cypress Semiconductor, John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Venture Capital, and L. J. Sevin of Sevin Rosen Venture Capital, who also served as board chairman.

It was settled in late October, with AMD getting limited rights to inspect Ross' RISC-related designs.

[5] Later, Ross was tasked by Cypress to develop the Pinnacle microprocessor, a superscalar SPARC implementation intended to compete with the Sun Microsystems and Texas Instruments SuperSPARC.

Cypress had bet the company's success on the hyperSPARC, threatening to abandon SPARC in favor of Digital Equipment Corporation's Alpha if Sun did not endorse the design.

As the hyperSPARC had failed to win major customers, Cypress sold Ross to Fujitsu for $23 million on 12 May 1993.

[6] Under Fujitsu, the existing board of directors was replaced with its own members with the exception of Dr. Ross, who was named chairman.

Combined with the creation of Ross Microcomputer earlier in the year, which incurred restructuring and other costs, they began to lose money.

An effort to regain the company's competitiveness was active at the time, and it involved developing a new 64-bit microprocessor code-named Viper.

It was an emergency engineering-wide Ross hyperSPARC upgrade which enabled Steve Jobs' Pixar to complete and deliver their animated movie Toy Story to Disney on schedule after the existing Sun Microsystems machines were overwhelmed in the late product development stage by Pixar's demanding new technology.