72 Facts About AMD

AMD later decided to leave to start his own semiconductor company, following the footsteps of Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, who together founded the semiconductor company Intel in July 1968.

In September 1969, AMD moved from its temporary location in Santa Clara to Sunnyvale, California.

AMD guaranteed quality control to United States Military Standard, an advantage in the early computer industry since unreliability in microchips was a distinct problem that customers – including computer manufacturers, the telecommunications industry, and instrument manufacturers – wanted to avoid.

Also in 1970, AMD produced its first proprietary product, the Am2501 logic counter, which was highly successful.

In 1971, AMD entered the RAM chip market, beginning with the Am3101, a 64-bit bipolar RAM.

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That year AMD greatly increased the sales volume of its linear integrated circuits, and by year-end the company's total annual sales reached US$4.

When Intel began installing microcode in its microprocessors in 1976, it entered into a cross-licensing agreement with AMD, which was granted a copyright license to the microcode in its microprocessors and peripherals, effective October 1976.

In 1977, AMD entered into a joint venture with Siemens, a German engineering conglomerate wishing to enhance its technology expertise and enter the American market.

AMD closed Advanced Micro Computers in late 1981 after switching focus to manufacturing second-source Intel x86 microprocessors.

In 1980, AMD began supplying semiconductor products for telecommunications, an industry undergoing rapid expansion and innovation.

Intel and AMD entered into a 10-year technology exchange agreement, first signed in October 1981 and formally executed in February 1982.

The main result of the 1982 agreement was that AMD became a second-source manufacturer of Intel's x86 microprocessors and related chips, and Intel provided AMD with database tapes for its 8086, 80186, and 80286 chips.

That year, AMD was listed in the book The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America, and later made the Fortune 500 list for the first time in 1985.

AMD rode out the mid-1980s crisis by aggressively innovating and modernizing, devising the Liberty Chip program of designing and manufacturing one new chip or chipset per week for 52 weeks in fiscal year 1986, and by heavily lobbying the U S government until sanctions and restrictions were put in place to prevent predatory Japanese pricing.

AMD increased its EPROM memory market share in the late 1980s.

AMD had a large, successful flash memory business, even during the dotcom bust.

In 2003, to divest some manufacturing and aid its overall cash flow, which was under duress from aggressive microprocessor competition from Intel, AMD spun off its flash memory business and manufacturing into Spansion, a joint venture with Fujitsu, which had been co-manufacturing flash memory with AMD since 1993.

In December 2005, AMD divested itself of Spansion in order to focus on the microprocessor market, and Spansion went public in an IPO.

On July 24, 2006, AMD announced its acquisition of the Canadian 3d graphics card company ATI Technologies.

In October 2008, AMD announced plans to spin off manufacturing operations in the form of GlobalFoundries Inc, a multibillion-dollar joint venture with Advanced Technology Investment Co.

AMD acquired the low-power server manufacturer SeaMicro in early 2012, with an eye to bringing out an Arm64 server chip.

On October 8, 2014, AMD announced that Rory Read had stepped down after three years as president and chief executive officer.

On October 16, 2014, AMD announced a new restructuring plan along with its Q3 results.

Effective July 1, 2014, AMD reorganized into two business groups: Computing and Graphics, which primarily includes desktop and notebook processors and chipsets, discrete GPUs, and professional graphics; and Enterprise, Embedded, and Semi-Custom, which primarily includes server and embedded processors, dense servers, semi-custom SoC products, engineering services, and royalties.

In October 2020, AMD announced that it was acquiring Xilinx in an all-stock transaction.

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In February 1982, AMD signed a contract with Intel, becoming a licensed second-source manufacturer of 8086 and 8088 processors.

In 1984, Intel internally decided to no longer cooperate with AMD in supplying product information in order to shore up its advantage in the marketplace, and delayed and eventually refused to convey the technical details of the Intel 80386.

In 1987, AMD invoked arbitration over the issue, and Intel reacted by canceling the 1982 technological-exchange agreement altogether.

In 1990, Intel countersued AMD, renegotiating AMD's right to use derivatives of Intel's microcode for its cloned processors.

In March 1991, AMD released the Am386, its clone of the Intel 386 processor.

In 1993, AMD introduced the first of the Am486 family of processors, which proved popular with a large number of original equipment manufacturers, including Compaq, which signed an exclusive agreement using the Am486.

Finally, in an agreement effective 1996, AMD received the rights to the microcode in Intel's x386 and x486 processor families, but not the rights to the microcode in the following generations of processors.

In 1996, AMD purchased NexGen, specifically for the rights to their Nx series of x86-compatible processors.

AMD gave the NexGen design team their own building, left them alone, and gave them time and money to rework the Nx686.

In May 2007, AMD abandoned the string "64" in its dual-core desktop product branding, becoming Athlon X2, downplaying the significance of 64-bit computing in its processors.

In 2008, AMD started to release dual-core Sempron processors exclusively in China, branded as the Sempron 2000 series, with lower HyperTransport speed and smaller L2 cache.

AMD completed its dual-core product portfolio for each market segment.

In September 2007, AMD released the first server Opteron K10 processors, followed in November by the Phenom processor for desktop.

However, AMD built the Spider at 65nm, which was uncompetitive with Intel's smaller and more power-efficient 45nm.

AMD suffered an unexpected decrease in revenue based on production problems for the Llano.

AMD claimed dramatic performance-per-watt efficiency improvements in high-performance computing applications with Bulldozer cores.

In 2012, AMD announced it was working on Arm products, both as a semi-custom product and server product.

AMD released the Zen-based high-end Ryzen 7 "Summit Ridge" series CPUs on March 2, 2017, mid-range Ryzen 5 series CPUs on April 11, 2017, and entry level Ryzen 3 series CPUs on July 27, 2017.

AMD later released the Epyc line of Zen derived server processors for 1P and 2P systems.

In October 2017, AMD released Zen-based APUs as Ryzen Mobile, incorporating Vega graphics cores.

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AMD launched CPUs with the 12nm Zen+ microarchitecture in April 2018, following up with the 7nm Zen 2 microarchitecture in June 2019, including an update to the Epyc line with new processors using the Zen 2 microarchitecture in August 2019, and Zen 3 slated for release in Q3 2020.

On 30 August 2010, John Trikola announced that AMD would retire the ATI brand for its graphics chipsets in favor of the AMD name.

In 2008, the ATI division of AMD released the TeraScale microarchitecture implementing a unified shader model.

In 2011, AMD released the successor to TeraScale, Graphics Core Next.

In September 2015, AMD separated the graphics technology division of the company into an independent internal unit called the Radeon Technologies Group headed by Raja Koduri.

In January 2020, AMD announced that its second generation RDNA graphics architecture was in development, with the aim of competing with the Nvidia RTX graphics products for performance leadership.

In October 2020, AMD announced their new RX 6000 series series GPUs, their first high-end product based on RDNA2 and capable of handling ray-tracing natively, aiming to challenge Nvidia's RTX 3000 GPUs.

In particular, AMD noted their unique position of offering both x86 and graphics intellectual property.

The situation changed in 2003 with the release of Athlon 64 processors, and AMD chose not to further design its own chipsets for its desktop processors while opening the desktop platform to allow other firms to design chipsets.

Initiative went further with the release of Opteron server processors as AMD stopped the design of server chipsets in 2004 after releasing the AMD-8111 chipset, and again opened the server platform for firms to develop chipsets for Opteron processors.

AMD returned to the server chipsets market with the AMD 800S series server chipsets.

AMD released new chipsets in 2017 to support the release of their new Ryzen products.

In February 2002, AMD acquired Alchemy Semiconductor for its Alchemy line of MIPS processors for the hand-held and portable media player markets.

On June 13, 2006, AMD officially announced that the line was to be transferred to Raza Microelectronics, Inc, a designer of MIPS processors for embedded applications.

AMD has introduced 64-bit processors into its embedded product line starting with the AMD Opteron processor.

In January 2011, AMD announced the AMD Embedded G-Series Accelerated Processing Unit.

In May 2012, AMD Announced the AMD Embedded R-Series Accelerated Processing Unit.

Since that time AMD has released regular updates to their embedded GPU lineup in 2009, 2011, 2015, and 2016; reflecting improvements in their GPU technology.

In 2011, AMD began selling Radeon branded DDR3 SDRAM to support the higher bandwidth needs of AMD's APUs.

AMD noted in 2017 that these products are "mostly distributed in Eastern Europe" and that it continues to be active in the business.

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AMD has made considerable efforts towards opening its software tools above the firmware level in the past decade.

AMD pursued a strategy of collaboration with other semiconductor manufacturers IBM and Motorola to co-develop production technologies.

In 2008, AMD spun off its chip foundries into an independent company named GlobalFoundries.

Part of the GlobalFoundries spin-off included an agreement with AMD to produce some number of products at GlobalFoundries.

In 2018, AMD started shifting the production of their CPUs and GPUs to TSMC, following GlobalFoundries' announcement that they were halting development of their 7 nm process.

AMD utilizes strategic industry partnerships to further its business interests as well as to rival Intel's dominance and resources:.

AMD has a long history of litigation with former partner and x86 creator Intel.