The semiconductor industry is quite young, with many large companies being only a few decades old. However, there are veterans celebrating half-century anniversaries, including Intel, which 50 years since its founding last year, and its long-time competitor AMD. Let’s recall some important milestones in the rich history of the company, which was founded on May 1, 1969, with its headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, and initial capital of just $50,000.
The first CEO of AMD, starting in September 1969, was one of the co-founders, Jerry Sanders, who led the company for an impressive 33 years until he left in April 2002. The company takes pride in the fact that one of his most famous quotes was, "The most important thing is people, and the products and profits will follow," which AMD strives to follow even now.
A significant achievement for the company was the release of the industry's first binary/hexadecimal logic counter, the Am2501 (an AMD original design) in September 1970, which proved very successful in the market and became a key milestone in the industry as a whole. Two more years passed, and in September 1972, the company went public, issuing 500,000 shares priced at $15.50 each, raising $7.2 million in its initial public offering.
In its early years, AMD not only produced its own chips but also manufactured processors under license. For example, in 1975, the company signed a cross-licensing agreement with Intel and began producing its first PC processor (am9080, an Intel 8080 equivalent), developed by AMD through reverse engineering, which was compatible with the original in terms of instruction set but outperformed it by 40% in speed.
A major milestone for the company was the signing of an agreement with IBM in 1982, making AMD the second supplier of microprocessors for the IBM PC with iAPX86 architecture. In February 1986, AMD introduced the world's first megabit (65K × 16-bit) programmable EPROM chip, manufactured using AMD's unique CMOS process technology. This product allowed manufacturers to prototype faster and modify their solutions for various markets.
In March 1991, AMD introduced the Am386 processor family, compatible with 32-bit processors based on the 80386 architecture — they were popular as more affordable alternatives to Intel's solutions. In April 1993, the Am486 was launched, surpassing Intel's equivalent in performance by 20% while maintaining the same price. All of these were essentially clones of Intel's solutions.
In March 1996, the debut of the famous 350nm AMD-K5 processors took place, the first independently designed x86 processor, compatible with a competitor's socket but based on RISC architecture. Standard instructions were recoded into microinstructions, significantly boosting performance. However, AMD could not outpace Intel in frequency this time.
The release of AMD-K6 chips in April 1997 allowed the price of PCs to drop below the psychological barrier of $1000 for the first time. These 250nm chips were based on developments from NextGen and another RISC-based architecture called Nx686. AMD focused on the price-performance ratio, as it was unable to surpass the Pentium II. The K6 architecture was improved several times (K6 II added several instruction sets known as 3DNow! technology, and K6 III included L2 cache).
However, AMD truly broke new ground again in June 1999 with the launch of its seventh-generation processors, the famous Athlon, which allowed the company to seize the performance crown from Intel. These were also the first processors to use copper in manufacturing instead of aluminum.
In March 2000, the Athlon 1000 was released, becoming the first in the industry to reach a clock speed of 1 GHz. By June 2001, the era of modern multi-core processors began with the release of the Athlon MP. Notably, the Athlon MP was AMD's first solution aimed at the market servers and workstations.
On April 25, 2002, a new CEO, Hector Ruiz, took over the management of AMD. He had been with the company as Chief Operating Officer and President since January 2000, previously overseeing the semiconductor product sector at Motorola. By January 2003, he had signed a strategic agreement with IBM for the joint development of production technologies employing advanced structures and materials, including SOI transistors (silicon on insulator), copper interconnects, and improved low-k dielectrics.
In April 2003, the world's first x86 processor with 64-bit architecture was introduced, which has long since become the norm. This was the server-based Opteron on the AMD64 architecture. By September, PC users also received 64-bit chips in the form of the Athlon 64 FX, which were then considered the most advanced and powerful consumer processors on the market.
A significant historical milestone was the acquisition of ATI Technologies for $5.4 billion in October 2006, one of the leading graphics card manufacturers at the time. This team, gradually changing over the years, has been responsible for all subsequent GPUs released under the Radeon brand. Graphics cards became a very important part of the company's business, and this new market sector helped it navigate difficult times.
In September 2007, the world saw the launch of the first 4-core single-chip processor, the AMD Opteron. It also featured Rapid Virtualization Indexing technology for virtualization tasks. In June 2008, AMD introduced the FireSteam 9250, the first GPU to surpass a peak computational performance of 1 teraflop. This was a specialized solution for high-parallel general-purpose computing.
A month later, in July 2008, AMD had a new CEO and President—Dirk Meyer, who had been with the company since 1995 and contributed to the original Athlon processor. Unfortunately for the company, during his tenure, many promising directions were closed in an effort to optimize costs, including the development of mobile single-chip systems based on ARM. In January 2009, Qualcomm acquired Imageon IP (ATI's mobile graphics) and continues to actively develop it in its Adreno GPUs (a name that is an anagram of Radeon).
In March 2009, the company decided to focus on chip development, spinning off its manufacturing into a new joint venture with the Arab ATIC called GlobalFoundries. The latter existed quite successfully, but not long ago its owners opted out of competing with TSMC, Samsung, and other leading contract semiconductor manufacturers and halted work on mastering advanced 7nm processes.
Graphics cards with a frequency above 1 GHz are no longer surprising today, but the first such product was the ATI Radeon HD 4890, released in May 2009, which came in versions with a factory-overclocked GPU up to 1 GHz and air cooling. In September 2009, the ATI Eyefinity technology was introduced, allowing up to six high-resolution displays to be connected to a single graphics card.
The acquisition of ATI was largely aimed at effectively linking the GPU and CPU in a single product, and in June 2010 AMD showcased its first accelerated processor at Computex 2010. By January 2011, the first single-chip APU was launched on the market.
In August 2011, the head of the company was handed over to Rory Read, who came from a similar position at Lenovo Group. In June 2012, for security reasons (primarily various online payments), a special core based on ARM TrustZone technology was integrated into AMD processors. However, Read did not stay in his position for long — in October 2014, the company was led by its current leader, Lisa Su.
In 2012, AMD introduced a new graphics architecture called Graphics Core Next (GCN). The first graphics card from this architecture was the Radeon HD 7770. GCN introduced support for x86 addressing with a unified address space for both CPU and GPU, RISC SIMD instructions replaced VLIW MIMD for GPGPU use, among other changes. To this day, this architecture, continuously evolving, remains the foundation of the company's graphics accelerators.
It is GCN that formed the basis of modern consoles Xbox One and PlayStation 4 released in 2013-2014 — both systems were based on similar (with various nuances) single-chip AMD systems featuring 8 Jaguar CPU cores and different numbers of GPU compute units. It is believed that the truly new GPU architecture from AMD will be Navi, designed for PS5 and Xbox Next.
In November 2014, AMD introduced an open standard for frame rate synchronization with the display refresh rate — FreeSync, also known as VESA Adaptive Sync, which, after recent support from NVIDIA under G-Sync compatibility, essentially became the industry standard. The technology ideally allows for the elimination of frame tearing while achieving minimal response delay and a smoother gaming environment.
In June 2015, the company released the first graphics card that combined high-speed HBM memory and GPU in one package — the flagship AMD Radeon R9 Fury X achieved significantly higher bandwidth and tripled the performance per watt compared to the previous generation GDDR memory.
AMD had been hopelessly trailing Intel in CPU performance since the K10 and Bulldozer days, but in June 2016 there was a glimmer of hope: the company showcased a processor based on a fundamentally new x86 Zen architecture for the AM4 socket. This was an 8-core, 16-thread chip, which in December 2016 became the first generation of powerful Ryzen CPUs, prompting Intel to step up and also increase core counts. It’s no surprise, considering the launch of AMD Threadripper processors for enthusiasts. In the summer of 2017, the Zen architecture entered the server market with the EPYC family.
In November of last year, the company unveiled the world's first 7nm GPU for data centers in the form of Radeon Instinct MI60 and MI40 for machine learning and high-parallel computing tasks. This year saw the release of the first 7nm Radeon VII, and soon the launch of advanced 7nm Ryzen 3000 processors based on Zen 2 architecture and 7nm graphics cards based on Navi GPUs is expected. Overall, AMD is on the rise, and there’s plenty more interesting developments on the horizon for the half-century-old company, including the Google Stadia platform.
Source: 3dnews.ru
