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Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) ( NYSE:AMD) is a manufacturer of integrated circuits based in Sunnyvale, California. It is the second-largest supplier of x86 compatible processors, and a leading supplier of non-volatile flash memory. It was founded in 1969 by a group of defectors from Fairchild Semiconductor, including the flashy Jerry Sanders.
AMD is best known for the Athlon and Duron lines of x86-compatible processors. Their more general components have been found in early Apple computers and numerous other electronic devices.
AMD is publicly traded at NYSE with the symbol AMD. Its market capitalization was around US$5 billion at the end of 20032003 is a common year starting on Wednesday (link will take you to calendar), and also: The International Year of Freshwater The European Disability Year Summary Perhaps the defining global event of the year 2003 was the Invasion of Iraq launched by the U.
The company started as a producer of logic chips in 1969 and entered the RAMRandom Access Memory or RAM is a type of computer storage whose contents can be accessed in any order. This is in contrast to sequential memory devices such as magnetic tapes, discs and drums, in which the mechanical movement of the storage medium forces chip business in 1975Events January January 1 Watergate scandal: John N. Mitchell, H. Haldeman, John D. Ehrlichman are found guilty of the Watergate cover-up and are sentenced to 30 months to 8 years in jail on February 21 January 5 The Tasman Bridge in Tasmania, Australia, i. That same year, it introduced a reverse-engineered clone of the Intel 8080The Intel 8080 was an early microprocessor designed and manufactured by Intel. The 8-bit CPU was released in April 1974 running at 2 MHz, and is generally considered to be the first truly usable microprocessor CPU design. Description The Intel 8080 was th microprocessorIntel 80486DX2 and an Intel 80386 A microprocessor (abbreviated as P or uP is an electronic computer central processing unit (CPU) made from miniaturized transistors and other circuit elements on a single semiconductor integrated circuit (IC) (aka microch.
In February 1982Events January January 6 William Bonin is convicted of being the "freeway killer". January 8 AT&T agrees to divest itself of twenty-two subdivisions January 11 Mark Thatcher, son of the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, disappears in the Sahara du, AMD signed a contract with IntelThe following article is about the multinational corporation; intel is also an abbreviation for intelligence, used in reference to military intelligence and espionage. Intel Corporation is a US-based multinational corporation that is best known for design, becoming a licensed second-source manufacturer of the 8086 and 8088 processors. IBM wanted to use the Intel 8088 in its IBM PC, but IBM's policy at the time was to require at least two sources for its chips.
AMD later produced the 80286, or 286, under the same arrangement, but then Intel cancelled the agreement in 1986. The growing popularity of the PC clone market meant Intel could produce CPUs on its terms, rather than IBM's.
In 1991, AMD released the Am386, its clone of the later Intel 80386 processor. It took less than a year for AMD to sell a million units. AMD followed in 1993 with the Am486. Both sold at a significantly lower price than the Intel versions. Intel challenged AMD's right to produce these chips in court, but ultimately lost its case. The two competitors have had full cross-licensing agreements for patents and some copyrights from the very start: each partner can use the other's technological innovations without charge. AMD's 386DX-40 was very popular with smaller, independent clone manufacturers, and the Am486 was used by a number of large OEMs, including Compaq.
During this time, AMD attempted to embrace the perceived shift towards RISC with their own AMD 29K processor (based on a bitslice computational model), and they attempted to diversify into graphics and audio devices as well as flash memory. While the AMD 29K survived as an embedded processor and AMD continues to make industry leading flash memory, AMD was not as successful with its other endeavours. AMD decided to switch gears and concentrate solely on Intel compatible microprocessors and flash memory. This put them in direct competition with Intel for x86 compatible processors and their flash memory secondary markets.
Their first completely in-house processor was the K5, launched very belatedly in 1995. The "K" was a reference to " Kryptonite". It was intended to compete directly with the Intel Pentium CPU, which had been released in 1993, but architecturally it had more in common with the newly-released Pentium Pro than the Pentium or Cyrix's 6x86. There were a number of problems however; a confusing naming system was employed, with some chips being represented by their true core speed, others with a PR number. More tellingly, the K5 couldn't match the 6x86's integer performance, nor the Pentium's FPU performance. This, combined with the large die size and the fact that the design scaled badly, doomed the K5 to near-total failure in the market place. To its credit, however, the K5 didn't suffer from the compatibility problems that the 6x86 did, and it didn't run as hot as Cyrix's chip.
In 1996, AMD purchased NexGen, Inc. and the rights to intellectual property behind their Nx series of x86 compatible processors. In a year, they reworked the Nx686 microarchitecture and branded it the K6. NexGen's original design had never made it to market. The redesign included a feedback dynamic instruction reording mechanism, and MMX instructions. Most importantly AMD made it pin-compatible with Intel's Pentium, enabling it to be used in the widely available "Socket 7" based motherboards. Like the Nx686 and Nx586 before it, the K6 translated the Pentium compatible x86 instruction set to RISC-like micro-instructions. In the following year, AMD released the K6-2 which added a set of floating point multimedia instructions called 3DNow!, as well as a new socket standard called "Super Socket 7" both of which delivered enhanced performance.
In January 1999, the final iteration of the K6-x series, the 450 MHz K6-III, was extremely competitive with Intel's top of the line chips. This chip was essentially a K6-2 with 256 kilobytes of full-speed level 2 cache integrated into the core and a better branch prediction unit. While it matched (generally beating) the Pentium II/III in integer operations, the FPU was a non-pipelined serial design and could not compete with Intel's more advanced FPU architecture. Although 3DNow! could theoretically compensate for this weakness, few game developers made use of it, the most notable exception being ID Software's Quake 2.
Throughout its lifetime, the K6 processor came close, but never quite seemed to equal the performance of processor offerings from Intel. Furthermore, the motherboards that worked with the K6 were of varying quality, and AMD had process manufacturing difficulties which affected some shipments. AMD gained a reputation of making a somewhat slower and less reliable "x86 clone" even though the performance difference was slight and the best K6 compatible motherboards were very reliable. This forced AMD into a position of selling their K6 processors at a substantial discount versus Intel's P6 core based processors, the Pentium II and the Pentium III. Intel responded to AMD's lower prices with the "Celeron" version of their Pentiums which were cheaper and slower in a partially successful attempt to capture marketshare.
In August of 1999, AMD released the Athlon (K7) processor. The Athlon had an advanced micro-architecture geared towards overall performance. The timing of the release of this processor put it at a great performance advantage versus Intel's P6 core based processors (which culminated as their mainline processor in the Pentium III.) The Intel P6 core was nearing the end of its life-cycle, while the Athlon was just getting started. Objectively, the Athlon had higher "per clock" architectural performance versus the comparable Intel P6 core based parts, as well as higher frequencies. AMD announced a 1GHz Athlon in early March 2000 and delivered them in that same month. Intel also announced a 1Ghz Pentium a few days later, but did not ship them in significant volume until June of that year.
AMD also worked hard to increase the reliability and performance of motherboards for the Athlon. They also improved the discipline and predictability of their manufacturing process. AMD also released a second line of processors based on the Athlon core called the Duron which was a slower and cheaper version of the processor aimed at competing against the still-shipping Celeron processor, providing some insulation for the Athlon against AMD's prior reputation for only making cheaper and slower "Intel clones". The combination of these technical and marketing successes did much to repair and bolster AMD's reputation for making high-performance CPUs that shipped and worked reliably. AMD continued to undercut Intel on price which helped them establish up to 20% market share.
In 2001, Intel released the Pentium 4 architecture (code-named Willamette) which had a radically different microarchitecture than the Athlon or the P6 cores. While sporting a dramatically higher clock rate, the per-clock architectural performance of the Pentium 4 appears to be much slower than the Athlon or even Intel's own P6 core based processors. This lead some to believe that the Pentium 4 had higher performance because of its higher clock rate, despite benchmark performance.
AMD responded with a new K7 core (code-named Palomino) which had superior memory pre-fetching mechanisms, SSE (a set of floating-point extensions first featured on the Pentium III), an on-chip L2 cache and also re-branded them based on Model numbers which would approximately project the clock rate relative performance of these new Athlons versus the earliest versions of the Athlon. The net effect of this was for the Model numbers to be more comparable to the Pentium 4's actual clock rate. For AMD processors of a given Model number, the comparable Pentium 4 by corresponding clock rate showed rough parity on performance in a wide variety of benchmarks.
Intel countered AMD and its Athlon by ramping the Pentium 4 clock rate aggressively in its early lifetime, just as the Athlon was nearing its end of life, giving it a brief period of performance dominance. AMD responded with the "Thoroughbred" Athlon XP, essentially a 130 nanometre version of the Palomino. AMD later introduced the "Barton" core, which increased the L2 cache to 512 KiB.
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