The semiconductor industry is quite young, and many of the big companies in it are only a couple of decades old. But there are also veterans who celebrate half a century anniversaries. These include Intel (which 50 years since its founding last year) and its longtime rival AMD. Let's recall some important milestones in the rich history of the company, which was founded on May 1, 1969 with headquarters in Sunnyvale (California) with an authorized capital of only $50.
AMD's first CEO, from September 1969, was one of the co-founders, Jerry Sanders, who led the company for an impressive 33 years until he retired in April 2002. The company is proud that one of its most famous phrases was "People are the main thing, products and revenues will follow," which AMD strives to follow today.
An important achievement of the company was the release in September 1970 of the industry's first binary / hexadecimal logic counter Am2501 (AMD's own development), which proved to be very successful in the market and became an important milestone in the industry as a whole. Two more years passed, and in September 1972 the company became public: 500 shares worth $15,5 each were issued: $7,2 million was raised as part of the initial public offering on the stock exchange.
In the early years of its existence, AMD, in addition to its own chips, also produced processors under license. For example, in 1975, the company signed a cross-licensing agreement with Intel and began releasing its first PC processor (am9080, similar to the Intel 8080), developed by AMD on the basis of reverse engineering, which was compatible with the original in instruction set, but at the same time 40 % bypassed it in terms of speed.
A big milestone for the company was the signing of an agreement with IBM in 1982, under which AMD became the second supplier of microprocessors for the IBM PC with the iAPX86 architecture. In February 1986, AMD introduced the world's first megabit (65K × 16-bit) programmable read-only EPROM chip manufactured using AMD's unique CMOS process technology. The product allowed manufacturers to quickly prototype and modify their solutions for different markets.
In March 1991, AMD introduced the Am386 family of processors compatible with 32-bit 80386 processors, which were popular as more affordable alternatives to Intel solutions. In April 1993, the Am486 entered the market, which outperformed the Intel counterpart in performance by 20%, while having the same cost. All these were, in fact, clones of Intel solutions.
March 1996 saw the debut of the famous 350nm AMD-K5 processors, the first independently developed x86 processor compatible with a competitor's pad but based on the RISC architecture. Ordinary instructions were recoded into microinstructions, which helped to greatly improve performance. But AMD couldn't beat Intel this time around in terms of frequency.
The release of the AMD-K6 chips in April 1997 brought the cost of a PC down below the psychological $1000 mark for the first time. These 250nm chips were based on NextGen and another RISC-based Nx686 architecture. AMD was betting on the price-performance ratio, as it was not possible to bypass the Pentium II. The K6 architecture has been improved several times (in K6 II, several instruction sets were added under the name of 3DNow! technology, and in K6 III - L2 cache).
However, the real breakthrough for AMD came again in June 1999 with the launch of the seventh generation processors, the famous Athlon, which allowed the company to snatch the palm in terms of performance from Intel. They were also the first processors to use copper instead of aluminum.
In March 2000, the Athlon 1000 was released, reaching the 1 GHz clock speed mark for the first time in the industry. And already in June 2001, the era of modern multi-core processors began with the release of the Athlon MP. By the way, Athlon MP was the first AMD solution created with an eye on the market of servers and workstations.
On April 25, 2002, AMD's new chief executive, Hector Ruiz, who had served as COO and president since January 2000 and previously managed Motorola's semiconductor products business, took over AMD's management responsibilities. As early as January 2003, he entered into a strategic agreement with IBM to jointly develop manufacturing technologies using advanced structures and materials, including SOI (silicon on insulator) transistors, copper junctions, and improved low dielectric insulators.
In April 2003, the world's first x86 processor appeared with a 64-bit architecture, now the norm. It was an AMD64 based server Opteron. Already in September, PC users also received 64-bit chips in the form of Athlon 64 FX, which were then considered the most advanced and powerful consumer processors on the market.
The next historical milestone was definitely the acquisition in October 2006 for $5,4 billion of ATI Technologies, one of the leading manufacturers of video cards at that time. It is this team, gradually changing the composition, that is responsible for all subsequent GPUs produced under the Radeon brand. Graphics cards have become a very important part of the company's business and this new market sector has helped to get through difficult times.
In September 2007, the world's first 4-core single-chip processor was launched in the face of AMD Opteron. It also received Rapid Virtualization Indexing technology for virtualization tasks. In June 2008, AMD introduced the first GPU in the FireSteam 9250 to break the 1 teraflops peak computing performance mark. It was a specialized solution for general purpose highly parallel computations.
A month later, in July 2008, AMD changed its CEO and president again - it was Dirk Meyer, who had been with the company since 1995 and had a hand in the original Athlon processor. Unfortunately for the company, it was under him that many promising areas were closed in order to optimize costs, including the development of mobile single-chip systems based on ARM - in January 2009, Qualcomm acquired Imageon IP (ATI mobile graphics) and continues to actively develop it in its Adreno GPUs ( this name is an anagram for Radeon).
In March 2009, the company decided to focus on chip development by spun off production into a new joint venture with Arab ATIC, GlobalFoundries. The latter existed quite successfully, but not so long ago its owners abandoned competition with TSMC, Samsung and other leading contract semiconductor manufacturers and curtailed work on the development of advanced 7nm standards.
Today you will not surprise anyone with video cards with a frequency above 1 GHz, but the first such product was in May 2009 the ATI Radeon HD 4890, which was produced in versions with a factory overclocked GPU up to 1 GHz and air cooling. And in September 2009, ATI Eyefinity technology was introduced, which made it possible to connect up to six high-resolution displays to one video card.
The acquisition of ATI was largely done to effectively bundle the GPU and CPU in one product, and in June 2010 AMD showed its first accelerated processor at Computex 2010. And in January 2011, the first single-chip APU was released to the market.
In August, 2011 the post of the head of the company was transferred to Rory Read (Rory Read) who passed from a similar post from Lenovo Group. In June 2012, for security purposes (first of all, various online payments), a special core based on ARM TrustZone technology was introduced into AMD processors. However, Reid did not remain in his post for long - already in October 2014, the company was headed by its current leader Lisa Su.
In 2012, AMD introduced the new Graphics Core Next (GCN) graphics architecture. The first video card was the Radeon HD 7770. GCN introduced support for x86 addressing with a unified address space for CPU and GPU, began using RISC SIMD instructions instead of VLIW MIMD for GPGPU, and made other changes. Until now, this architecture, constantly evolving, is the basis of the company's graphics accelerators.
It was GCN that formed the basis of the modern Xbox One and PlayStation 2013 consoles released in 2014-4 - both systems were based on similar (with various nuances) AMD single-chip systems with 8 Jaguar CPU cores and a different number of GPU computing units. It is believed that AMD's truly new GPU architecture will be Navi, which is being created for the PS5 and Xbox Next.
In November 2014, AMD introduced FreeSync, an open frame-rate synchronization standard, also known as VESA Adaptive Sync, which, with NVIDIA's recent support for G-Sync compatibility, has become the de facto industry standard. The technology ideally allows you to get rid of tearing frames, while achieving minimal response delay and a smoother gaming environment.
In June 2015, the company released the first graphics card that combines high-speed HBM memory and GPU under one package - AMD's flagship Radeon R9 Fury X received significantly more bandwidth and tripled the performance per watt of previous generation GDDR memory.
AMD has lagged hopelessly behind Intel in terms of CPU performance since the days of the K10 and Bulldozer, but in June 2016 the light dawned: the company first showed a processor based on the brand new x86 Zen architecture for the AM4 pad. It was an 8-core, 16-thread chip that evolved into the first generation of powerful Ryzen CPUs in December 2016, forcing Intel to move on and start ramping up core counts as well. No wonder, given the release of AMD Threadripper processors for enthusiasts. In the summer of 2017, the Zen architecture entered the server market thanks to the EPYC family.
Last November, the company introduced the world's first 7nm GPU for data centers with the Radeon Instinct MI60 and MI40 for machine learning and highly parallel computing. Already this year, the first 7nm Radeon VII was released, and soon the launch of advanced 7nm Ryzen 3000 processors based on the Zen 2 architecture and 7nm graphics cards based on the Navi GPU is expected. In general, AMD is on the rise, and the company with half a century of history has a lot of interesting things ahead of it, like the Google Stadia platform.
Source: 3dnews.ru