Advanced Micro Devices

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American semiconductor company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and similar technology products from consumption. Its core products include microprocessors, motherboard chipsets, auxiliary integrated circuits, embedded processors, and graphics processors for servers, workstations, personal computers, and embedded system applications.

AMD is the second largest vendor of microprocessors based on the x86 architecture and also one of the largest manufacturers of graphics processing units. It also owns 8.6% of Spansion, a supplier of non-volatile flash memory. In 2011, AMD ranked 11th in the list of semiconductor manufacturers in terms of revenue.

Corporate history

AMD Headquarters in Sunnyvale, California.

AMD Markham in Canada, formerly ATI headquarters.

Lone Star AMD field LEED in Austin, Texas.

Advanced Micro Devices was founded on May 1, 1969 by a group of Fairchild Semiconductor executives, including Jerry Sanders III, Edwin Turney, John Carey, Steven Simonsen, Jack Gifford, and 3 members of the Gifford team: Frank Botte, Jim Giles and Larry Stenger. The company began producing logic ICs, then entered the RAM memory business in 1975. That same year, it reverse-engineered a copy of the Intel 8080 microprocessor, which it named the AMD 9080. During this period, AMD also designed and produced a series of Bit slicing processors (Am2901, Am29116, Am293xx) that were used in various microcomputer designs.

During that time, AMD tried to change the perception of RISC with its AMD 29k processors and tried to diversify it by introducing graphics and video units as well as EPROM memories. This found success in the mid-1980s with the AMD7910 and AMD7911, some of the first drives to support various standards from both Bell and CCITT at either 1200 baud half duplex or 300/300 full duplex. The AMD 29k survived as an embedded processor and AMD spin-off Spansion became a leading producer of flash memory. AMD decides to change course and focus solely on Intel-compatible microprocessors, placing it directly in competition with Intel and flash memories for secondary markets.

AMD announces the acquisition of ATI Technologies on July 24, 2006. AMD pays $4.3 billion in cash and $58 million in stock for a total of $5.4 billion. The acquisition was completed on October 25, 2006, and ATI is now part of AMD.

In December 2006, AMD and its main competitor, Nvidia, were told they may be violating antitrust laws, including pricing.

In October 2008, AMD announced plans to spin off manufacturing operations in the form of a multi-billion dollar joint venture with technology company Advanced Investment Co., an investment company formed by the Abu Dhabi government. The new company is called GlobalFoundries Inc. This alliance would allow AMD to focus solely on chip design. The decision was accompanied by the loss of nearly 1,000 jobs, or about 10% of AMD's global workforce..

In August 2011, AMD announced that former Lenovo executive Rory Read would join the company as CEO, following Dirk Meyer.

AMD announced in November 2011 plans to lay off more than 10% (1,400) of employees in all divisions worldwide. This action would be completed in Q1 2012 with most layoffs taking place before Christmas 2011. AMD announced in October 2012 that it plans to lay off an additional 15% of its workforce with an indeterminate effective date to reduce costs. costs in the face of decreased sales revenue.

AMD acquired low-power server maker SeaMicro in early 2012 as part of a strategy to regain lost market share in the server chip market.

History of market launches

8086, Am286, Am386, Am486, Am5x86

In 1982 AMD signed a contract with Intel, becoming another licensed manufacturer of 8086 and 8088 processors, this because IBM wanted to use Intel 8088 in its IBM PCs, but IBM's policies at the time required at least two suppliers for its chips. AMD later produced, under the same deal, 80286, or 286, processors, but Intel canceled the contract in 1986, refusing to disclose technical details of the i386. The growing popularity of the PC clone market meant that Intel could produce CPUs on its own terms, not IBM's.

AMD appealed that decision and subsequently won in court arbitration. It began a lengthy legal process that would only end in 1991, when the California Supreme Court finally ruled in favor of AMD, forcing Intel to pay more than $1 billion in damages for breach of contract. Subsequent legal disputes centered on whether or not AMD had legal rights to use derivatives of Intel's microcode. The rulings favored both parties. In view of the uncertainty, AMD was forced to develop "clean" of the Intel code. Thus, while one engineering team described the functions of the code, a second team without access to the original code had to develop microcode that performed the same functions.

At this point, Jerry Sanders may as well have withdrawn from the market. But in 1991 AMD launches the Am386, its clone of the Intel 80386 processor. In less than a year AMD sold one million units. AMD's 386DX-40 was very popular with small independent manufacturers. Then in 1993 came the Am486 which, like its predecessor, sold for significantly less than the Intel versions. Am486 was used in numerous OEM equipment and even by Compaq proving its popularity. But again it was a clone of Intel technology; And as PC industry cycles shortened, continuing to clone Intel products was an increasingly unfeasible strategy since AMD would always be after Intel.

On December 30, 1994, the California Supreme Court finally denied AMD the right to use i386 microcode. Subsequently, an agreement between the two companies (the terms of which are still top secret) allowed AMD to produce and sell microprocessors using Intel's 286, 386, and 486 microcode. The agreement appears to have allowed some cross-licensing of patents, allowing to both parties the use of technological innovations without payment of rights. Beyond the concrete details of the agreement, there has since been no significant legal action between the companies.

K5, K6, Athlon, Duron and Sempron

The first completely new x86 processor manufactured by AMD was in 1995 when it developed its first completely new processor: the AMD K5. This first model is interesting because it is actually a RISC architecture processor, with an integrated x86 translator so that PCs of the time could understand the instructions issued by the processor. The "K" is a reference to kryptonite, which according to comic book lore is the only substance that can harm Superman, a clear reference to Intel, which dominated the market at the time, as "Superman". The number "5" refers to the fifth generation of processors, in which Intel introduced the name Pentium because the United States Patent Office ruled that a single number could not be registered as a trademark.

In 1995, AMD acquired RISC architecture processor maker NexGen primarily for the rights to the NX series of x86-compatible processors. AMD gave the NexGen design team a building of their own, left them alone, and gave them time and money to rework the Nx686. The result was the K6 processor, introduced in 1995 and 1996. Although the K6 was based on Socket 7, some versions like the K6-3/450 were faster than Intel's Pentium II (6th generation processor).

The K7 is AMD's seventh generation x86 processor, making its debut on June 23, 1999, under the Athlon brand. Unlike previous AMD processors, it could not be used on the same motherboards, due to licensing issues over Intel Slot 1, AMD then decides to use the letter "A" which references the Alpha processor bus. Duron was a limited and lower cost version of the Athlon (64KB instead of 256KB L2 cache) with a 462-pin PGA socket (Socket A) or soldered directly to the motherboard. Sempron was released as a lower cost Athlon XP processor replacing the Duron in the "A" PGA, since then this line has been maintained and updated up to the AM3 socket.

On October 9, 2001, the Athlon XP was released, followed by the Athlon XP with 512KB L2 cache on February 10, 2003.

AMD64 / K8

K8 is a major revision of the K7 architecture, the most notable improvement of which is the addition of 64-bit extensions to the x86 instruction set. This is important to AMD as it marks an attempt to define the x86 standard and prevail, rather than follow the standards set by Intel. And in this regard, AMD has succeeded. The story has turned and Microsoft adopted AMD's instruction set, leaving Intel to reverse-engineer AMD's specifications (EM64T). Other notable features of K8 are the increase in general purpose registers (from 8 to 16 registers), the Direct Connect Architecture, and the use of HyperTransport.

The AMD64 project may be the culmination of the visionary strategy of Jerry Sanders, whose corporate goal for AMD was to turn it into a powerful research company in its own right, and not just a low-priced clone factory, with close profit margins.

AMD Opteron is the corporate server version of K8; and although it was conceived by the company to compete against Intel's IA-64 Itanium line, given the latter's low sales and production volumes, it currently competes with Intel's Xeon line.

Dual-core Athlon 64 X2

Turion 64

The AMD Turion 64 processor is a low-power version of the AMD Athlon 64 processor intended for laptops, which came out to compete against Intel's Centrino technology. They come in two series, ML with a maximum consumption of 35 W and MT with a consumption of 25 W, compared to 27 W for the Intel Pentium M. Besides that, there are millions of them.

Phenom (K10)

In November 2006, AMD made public the development of its new processor codenamed "Barcelona", launched in mid-2007. With this processor, the K8L architecture began.

After Intel's total dominance with its 'CORE' architecture, AMD had to re-engineer its production technology and ultimately make the leap to 65nm and native Quad Cores, as opposed to Quad Cores. FX, which are 2 dual cores on the same motherboard. A native Quad core (Monolithic), means that the four processor cores are completely independent of each other, unlike the "Kentsfield" (2 "Conroe") and the "Clovertown" (2 Kentsfield) from Intel, and from AMD's own Quad FX. The first processors to use the Barcelona core will be the Quad Core Opteron.

Features

• 65nm manufacturing process.
• Settings and compatibility for multi-socket platforms (4x4).
• 4MB cache L3. (Shared for the 4 cores).
• 9512KB cache L2. (For each core).
• Hyper Transport 3.0
• Support for DDR3 memories.
• SSE4 Extended Instruction Support.

Athlon II and Phenom II

Finally, AMD moved from 65nm to 45nm in manufacturing with its new AMD Athlon II and Phenom II. Both use both Socket AM2+ and AM3, thus having support for DDR3.

• In Dual Core "X2" are the models: 555, 560. (Compatible with AM2+ and AM3). With a TDP of 80 W. With some base plates, the 2 cores can be unlocked to the Phenom II X2, so it would become a Phenom II X4, with the 4 cores working, that is, because in the manufacturing process, if they do not pass the quality test and give some failure, they disable the cores, cache and/or similar. For example a 4-core Phenom II 965BE, subject you to rigorous tests, if one of its cores has faults, disable it and sell them as a lower model.

• In Quad Core "X4" are the models: 955BE, 965BE, 970BE. (Compatible with AM2+ and AM3). With a TDP of 125 W in revision C3There are also 140 W, but they were from an earlier review, the C2. The acronyms BE, means Black Edition, are those that have the unlocked multiplier, to perform a better overclocking. These processors are called under the name of Deneb.

• In Six Core "X6" are the models: 1055T, 1075T, 1090T, 1100T. (Compatible with AM3). With a TDP of 140 W. 1090T and 1100T processors are BE. These are called Thuban

Fusion, Bobcat, Bulldozer and Vishera

After the merger between AMD and ATI, the initiative codenamed "Fusion" announced that some of its core chips will be attached to the CPU, including a minimal 16-lane PCI Express link to accommodate external PCI Express peripherals, completely eliminating the need for a motherboard northbridge. In the initiative, it is seen how some of the processing originally done on the CPU (for example, floating point unit operations) is transferred to the GPU, which is better optimized for calculations. This fusion was released by AMD as an Accelerated Processing Unit (APU).

Llano was the second APU released, aimed at the general market, incorporating a CPU and GPU on the same chip, as well as Northbridge features, and tagged in the new AMD timeline with the use of & #34;Socket FM1" and DDR3 memory. These, however, were not based on the new bulldozer core and would in fact be similar to the Phenom II "Deneb" which serves as AMD's high-end processor, until the release of the new 32nm parts. On September 28, 2011, AMD said that in the third quarter of 2011 it will not have a 10% revenue increase as previously planned, due to the manufacturing issue with the 32 nm Fusion Llano chips.

Bulldozer is AMD's code name for the second release of CPUs for desktop processors released on October 12, 2011. This 15h family microarchitecture is the successor to the 10h (K10) family microarchitecture and design methodology M-SPACE. Bulldozer is designed from the ground up, not a development of previous processors. The core is specifically targeted at computing products with 10-125 watt TDP. AMD aims to dramatically improve performance-per-watt efficiency in high-performance computing (HPC) applications with Bulldozer cores.

Vishera is AMD's series of processors that succeeded Bulldozer.

Bobcat is AMD's latest x86 processor core targeting the low-cost, low-power market. It was revealed during a speech by AMD Executive Vice President Henri Richard at Computex 2007 and was put into production in the first quarter of 2011. A major supporter was Executive Vice President Mario A. Rivas who found it difficult to compete in the x86 market with a single core optimized for the 10-100 watt range and actively promoted the development of a simpler core with a target range of 1-10 watts.

Chips based on ARM architecture

AMD plans to release an ARM chip for use in servers in 2014 as an alternative to current low-power x86 chips as part of a strategy to regain lost market share in the server chip business.

Chips based on Zen architecture, Zen 2 and Zen 3

Zen is a new architecture for x86-64 based Ryzen series CPUs and APUs. The architecture was built from scratch by a team led by Jim Keller, from 2012 to 2015. Although it wasn't until 2017 when it hit the market at the hands of AMD.

One of AMD's main goals with Zen processors was to increase CPI by at least 40%, but in February 2017 AMD announced that it had achieved a 52% increase. Processors built on the Zen architecture are built using 14 nm FinFET. Previous AMD processors were either 32nm ("Bulldozer" and "Piledriver" CPUs) or 28nm ("Steamroller" and "Exca"). Because of this, the Zen is much more energy efficient.

The Zen architecture is the first to feature AMD CPUs and APUs built for a single socket, Socket AM4. Also new to this architecture is the implementation of Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) technology, something Intel already had in some of its processors with its proprietary SMT Hyper-Threading implementation. Zen also has support for DDR4 memory.

AMD released the high-end Ryzen 7 "Summit Ridge" on March 2, 2017, Ryzen 5 mid-range CPUs on April 11, 2017, and entry-level Ryzen 3 series CPUs on July 27, 2017. In January 2018 AMD announced its Ryzen 2 series. And in May 2019, it announced the third generation of Ryzen that will use the Zen 2 architecture. These new Ryzen 3000 stand up, for the first time in a long time, in raw performance to Intel's most powerful processors. In addition, with its 7 nm construction and its soldered IHS, an improvement in its maximum frequencies is achieved, although the Ryzen 3000 have, in general, a low manual overclockability due to the fact that its advanced system of self-control of frequencies already increases performance dynamically up to near its limit.

At CES 2020, AMD announced its Ryzen Mobile 4000, as the first 7nm x86 mobile processor, the first 7nm 8-core (also 16-thread) high-performance mobile processor, and the first 8-core mobile processor (also 16 threads). This generation is still based on the Zen 2 architecture. In October 2020, AMD announced its Zen 3 CPU. In PassMark's single-threaded benchmark, the Ryzen 5 5600x outperformed all other CPUs besides the Ryzen 9 5950X.

Steam Deck, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Series S use chips based on the Zen 2 microarchitecture, with proprietary tweaks and different configurations in each system implementation that AMD sells in its own commercially available APUs.

Chips based on Zen 4 architecture

On September 27, 2022, the Zen 4 architecture was released, the new architecture uses TSMC's 5 nm process. Zen 4 powers the mainstream desktop processors Ryzen 7000 (codenamed " Raphael") and will be used in high-end mobile processors (codenamed "Range Dragon"), thin and light mobile processors (codenamed "Phoenix"), as well as the Epyc server 7004 processors (codenamed "Genoa" and "Bergamo").

Other platforms and technologies

50X15 Initiative

It consists of half the population having the ability to connect to the Internet by 2015; This is achieved through competitions between universities from various countries where they develop the best solutions for each region of the planet based on AMD technology. It also has prestigious multilateral organizations among which we can find the FAO and UNICEF

AMD / ATI

After completing the purchase of ATI in 2006, AMD restructures itself as the only company in the world that provides a range of solutions in all fields of microprocessors, graphics cards and chipsets. Thus, it also becomes the world's largest producer of chips for TV, consoles and mobile phones in the world, with this, AMD today becomes Intel's biggest rival in terms of semiconductor solutions.^{[citation required]}

In late 2010, AMD, of which ATI is a subsidiary, announced that starting with the Radeon HD 6000 series, it would replace the ATI brand with AMD to help power the AMD Vision and AMD Fusion platforms.

Integrated systems

Geode

In August 2003, AMD also purchased Geode (originally Cyrix MediaGX) from National Semiconductor to extend its existing line of x86 products for embedded systems. In mid-2004, it launched its low-power Geode processors with a maximum speed of 1.4 GHz and a maximum consumption of 19 W.

There are 3 families of processors within the range of Geode processors:

• AMD Geode LX, specially designed for "Light Client" based on x86 platforms, "set-top boxes" interactive, computers "single-board", Personal Agendas (PDAs), and mobile devices for Internet and entertainment.
• AMD Geode NX, designed for "Light Client", point-of-sale terminals (TPV), kiosks, high-performance printers and multimedia systems for the home.
• AMD Geode GX 533@ 10.1W Processor, specially designed for broadband Internet applications, and also with a consumption of just 10.1 W.

AMD Ryzen 7 1800X DSC 0251

1st and 2nd generation AMD Ryzen processors

• Processors AMD RyzenTM Threadripper (8 to 32 cores, up to 64 subprocesses, cache memory from 20 MB to 40 MB).
• Processors AMD RyzenTM 7 (8 cores, 16 subprocesses, 20 MB cache memory).
• Processors AMD RyzenTM 5 (from 4 to 6 nuclei, up to 12 subprocesses, cache memory from 10 MB to 16 MB).
• AMD RyzenTM 3 (4 cores, 10 MB cache memory).

AMD Ryzen 3rd Generation Desktop Processors

AMD Ryzen 3000 series desktop processors are based on the Zen 2 architecture, which is characterized by the use of chiplets. This allows for greater flexibility in leveraging TSMC's new 7-nanometer manufacturing node for higher performance, increasing frequencies, instructions per cycle, and number of cores. In its presentation at Computex 2019, AMD showed that these processors were capable of beating Intel products in single-core and multi-core performance, as well as being considerably more efficient. The officially confirmed processors are the following:

• Processors AMD RyzenTM 9 (16 cores, 32 subprocesses, 72 MB cache memory).
• Processors AMD RyzenTM 7 (8 cores, 16 subprocesses, 36 MB cache memory).
• Processors AMD RyzenTM 5 (6 cores, 12 subprocesses, 35 MB cache memory).
• Processors AMD RyzenTM 3 (4 cores, 8 subprocesses, 18 MB cache memory).

These processors have been available to the public since July 7, 2019.

AMD Ryzen 4800 7nm 2020

Current AMD Graphics Cards

• Radeon RX VEGA
• Radeon RX Series 500
• Radeon RX Series 400
• Radeon Pro
• Radeon VII
• Radeon RX Series 5000
• Radeon RX Series 6000
• Radeon RX Series 7000