AMD – Company Overview, History, Products

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is a US-based American multinational company that is popularly known for producing and manufacturing semiconductor devices and processors for computers and laptops. AMD is the most popular name for CPUs in gaming because of their advanced multi-core CPU performance in the industry. Advanced Micro Devices is headquartered in Santa Clara, California. AMD was founded by Jerry Sanders and his previous colleagues. In 2021, AMD generated a revenue of $16.4 billion.

The main products and services of AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) are mainly related to computer processors, graphics, business applications, and software for consumers. Some of the popular production lineups of AMD include processors, microprocessors, motherboards, integrated graphics cards, servers, personal computers, and server devices with host networks. They also produce their own system application and software for each of the hardware devices that they produce.

How Did AMD Start?

Advanced Micro Devices was founded by Jerry Sanders and seven others who were his colleagues from Fairchild Semiconductor (his former workplace) in 1969. He along with other Fairchild executives moved to create a separate semiconductor manufacturing company just like Intel was founded by some other electrical engineers working at Fairchild.

AMD was initially founded in Santa Clara but then it was shifted to Sunnyvale in California to engage more customers and funding options. Due to a large demand for CPUs at that time, AMD became the world’s second-largest manufacturer of processors after Intel. AMD started producing logic gate devices and chips and it gained several contracts with the United States Defense and Military because Intel was not able to meet the demand for the chips at that time.

The company went public in the year 1972 and it was the second source of producing Intel MOS/LSI circuits which involved the Arm architecture and dynamic registers. At this time, when Intel launched its first 4-bit processor 4004, then AMD soon entered the processor manufacturing market in 1975 by making a clone of the Intel 4004 but using a reverse arm-based architecture.

AMD had to sign a deal with Intel so that it could produce the cross-licensing agreement in the AMD processor and a copyright agreement to Intel for cloning their processor technology and other peripheral devices.

Products of AMD

By 1982, AMD and Intel had signed in a contract that AMD will be the second source manufacturing unit of the Intel 8086 and 8088 microprocessors. The problem that Intel was facing was that companies wanted it to produce from two sources and so AMD jumped in to produce the same chips under the Arm architecture.

The processor for the computer by AMD was a k5 processor which was based on the X86 Arm architecture. These processors by AMD were straightly a direct competition to Intel against its Pentium series of processors.

Then in 2006, after the acquisition of graphics technology company ATI Technologies by AMD, it entered the GPU market as well. AMD launched its own GPU lineups for the integrated and dedicated graphics card for laptops and personal computers specially designed for gaming. This technology was ahead of time for AMD as Intel was quite far behind in GPUs. It helped AMD a lot in integrating the CPU and GPU In the computer using the PCI express link into the motherboard of the computer. This technology is known as AMD APU (Accelerated Processing Unit).

AMD launched a separate Microprocessors architecture for its CPUs using the Bulldozer. Bulldozer architecture was aimed at providing the server and desktop computer architecture for their CPUs to deliver high-performance and high-efficiency applications.

After Bulldozer, the latest microarchitecture for their CPUs was the Zen-based architecture for the X86-64-based devices. The Zen architecture was mainly developed to enhance the performance of the CPUs. These Zen architecture-based processors were built on 14nm transistor technology to enhance the single-core and multi-core performance of the CPUs.