AMD





AMD is the popular acronym for Advanced Micro Devices. Founded in 1969, AMD
is the second-largest supplier of IBM PC compatible processors, and a
leading supplier of non-volatile flash memory. AMD makes the Athlon and
Duron lines of x86-compatible processors.

History

The company got its start in the microprocessor business in 1979 as a
second-source manufacturer of the Intel 8086 and 8088 processors, under
contract from Intel. AMD later produced the 80286, or 286, under the same
arrangement, but then Intel cancelled the agreement in 1986. AMD then made
its own clones of the later Intel 80386 and 80486 models, which were sold at
a significantly lower price than the Intel versions.

In 1995, AMD purchased NexGen, Inc and the rights to their Nx586 processor,
rather than copy Intel's Pentium processor. They rebranded the Nx586 the
AMD-K5, and shifted it from a proprietary socket to Intel's Socket 7
allowing the processor to be used in almost any Pentium compatible
motherboard. The processor used an x86 design which included several design
features common in RISC processors. Two years later, they released their
sixth-generation processor, the K6, and a year after that, the
multimedia-enhanced K6-2 was released. In January 1999, the final iteration
of the K6-x series, the 450 MHz K6-III, was briefly the fastest x86
microprocessor in the world. 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.

In August of the same year, AMD once again took the crown of having the
fastest x86 in the world when they released the Athlon (K7) processor.
Except for a few weeks here and there, AMD held this distinction with later
revisions of the Athlon until March of 2002. Since then, though, AMD's
processors have fallen behind Intel's in frequency and some measures of
performance. Even so, many users consider Athlon or K7 processors superior
to Intel's current Pentium 4 processors by way of a better architecture.
However, Athlons are known to have problems with low-quality power supply units.

The Future

AMD's future strategy appears to be diverging significantly from that of
Intel with the release of the 64-bit AMD64 "Hammer" architecture. Whilst
retaining support for the traditional x86 instruction set, the Hammer's
native 64-bit mode is unique to AMD processors and incompatible with the
IA-64 architecture used in Intel's Itanium processor. As a relatively
straightforward extension and cleanup of the basic x86 architecture, from a
technical perspective AMD's conservative approach looks likely to produce,
at least initially, better price-performance than the Itanium and its
successors. Whether system integrators and consumers will risk investment in
a non-Intel architecture is still, however, unclear.

AMD released its first AMD64 processor, the Opteron, in March 2003. The
Opteron is designed for workstation and server systems, including those
containing more than one processor. AMD plans to release the Athlon 64
processor intended for desktop and notebook computers later in 2003.