Advanced Micro Devices
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American chip manufacturer headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. AMD designs and produces microprocessors, chipsets, graphics chips and system-on -chip solutions for the computer, communications, and consumer industries. The company is listed in the Standard & Poor's 500 - stock index, employs approximately 11,000 people worldwide and is the eleventh largest semiconductor and the second largest x86 processor manufacturer in the world (as of 2011).
History
AMD was founded on 1 May 1969 under the name " Sanders Association " by Jerry Sanders III, Ed Turney and. Initial funding was provided by investors, including Intel founder Robert Noyce. The first integrated circuits were produced in November 1969. These formed the basis for the first self-developed product Am2501, which came to market in 1970.
As of 1973, the expansion began in countries outside the United States, a factory in Penang was established in Malaysia. 1975 AMD launched the production of memory chips, and in 1979 the company went public. In the same year a license from Intel for the production of 8086 was - and 8088 processors acquired. When this was terminated in 1986, this led to a lawsuit, was prohibited in the extrajudicial settlement AMD, from the 5th Generation ( 80586 - Intel Pentium ) replicas of Intel's processors to create. AMD subsequently developed their own architectures, the first was the AMD K5. With the acquisition of the CPU vendor NexGen in 1996 we created technological and human foundations for further developments. For the production of the chips was opened in 1998 in Dresden, the Fab30 and Fab36 2004. In the meantime they had taken over the CPU manufacturer Alchemy, produced the high-end low-power embedded processors with MIPS architecture.
Also in 2004, it was renamed founded in 1993 with Fujitsu Fujitsu joint venture AMD Semiconductor Limited in Spansion. The entire Flash production was presented by AMD and Fujitsu to Spansion. End of 2005, Spansion was then fully spun off as a separate public company, as the division had sustained losses.
In 2006, AMD took over ATI Technologies, a leading provider of at this time computer graphics chips. In the semiconductor industry, this acquisition was due to the particular constellations ( little direct competition between these companies, different research fields ) as unprecedented. Through this acquisition, AMD, as also supply main competitor Intel, important computer components " under one roof".
On September 8, 2008 said AMD CEO Dirk Meyer against the U.S. business magazine Fortune, that AMD " moving away from a shackled by Fabs towards a less concentrated on Fabs model will " ( Original: "going to go away from a captive fab model to more of a fabless model " ). This was the economic separation of the production facilities on the way. In October 2008, AMD announced its chip fabs in a together with the Investment Company Advanced Technology Investment Company ( ATIC) of Abu Dhabi powered Foundry outsource. In March 2009, the official name of the hived corporate division was announced: GlobalFoundries
In January 2011, resigned from his functions Dirk Meyer, AMD. After months of provisional guidance from the CFO Thomas Seifert, AMD appointed in August 2011, the former Lenovo manager Rory P. Read as new CEO.
On February 29, 2012 AMD took over the MicroServer specialists SeaMicro to better grasp so in the server market.
Current products / divisions
Microprocessors
In the desktop segment, AMD has currently (2011 ) on the AMD FX, Phenom II, Athlon II, Sempron, and the AMD Fusion APUs. These are available in versions with two to eight cores. The Athlon II must forgo an L3 cache and AMD Fusion integrates the CPU, GPU, video and other hardware accelerators on one die. The Phenom II thereby form the 1100 models with six cores, the power peak. The 1000 models also have six cores, but a lower clock frequency. The 900 models feature contrast, only four cores, the 800 series also has a smaller cache, the 700 series only three cores and the 500 series only two, because one, two or three cores were disabled. Not all Phenom II, Athlon II and Sempron models are designed for Socket AM3, with processors that are designed for Socket AM3, run on AM2 ( ) boards, unless the motherboard manufacturer has a BIOS update provides. Only some Phenom II models exclusively run on AM2 ( ) boards, which is due to the fact that the built- in CPU memory controller can only deal with DDRII memory. These CPUs are now but EOL and are no longer produced. The other part of AMD CPUs has a memory controller, which both DDRII and DDRIII can address. The AMD FX processors, the 8000 series are the power peak with four modules each with two cores. 6000 series with three modules and the 4000 series with two End of February 2012 was officially that AMD has developed the first commercially available desktop PC processor reaches a nominal clock frequency of 4 GHz ( 4.2 GHz ). The processor with the name FX -4170 works with four cores. Meanwhile, AMD can count creates the first x86 processor by the turbo the 5 GHz mark for its own portfolio. The processor with the name FX- 9590 works with 4 Piledriver modules and 8 threads.
In the server and workstation range AMD offers its Opteron processors based on the corresponding desktop processors, however, have additional HyperTransport links for communication in multi- processor systems.
The notebook segment is shared by AMD in two main areas: particularly compact "ultra thin" notebooks and "mainstream" notebooks. The range of ultra- light notebook includes mostly all under 14 inches ( there are exceptions ), but should not be construed as a " netbook ", but is similar to the Ultrabook by Intel. The Notebook mainstream area is increasingly covered by the AMD Fusion A with up to 4 cores, which came on the market in 2011. Its predecessor, the Puma platform consists of an Athlon or Turion, each with two cores. The power peak forms at AMD Turion Ultra. To page the Turions stands at the Puma platform a graphics card ( Mobility Radeon ) of the 3000 - or 4000 - generation. With the Puma platform, AMD also introduced the XGP technology. This was implemented by Fujitsu (Siemens), which have the first and only high-performance external graphics card on the market with the Amilo SA 3650 and the related Amilo Graphic Booster. The Amilo Graphics Booster is based on a Mobility Radeon HD 3870th
In the "ultra thin" notebook, subnotebook - and Netbookbereich with little space and little electricity demand is met on the Athlon Neo and Athlon II Neo. He has like the new Fusion E- series much more power than its main competitor Intel Atom and is supported by a powerful onboard graphics than that for the atom. The new low-power Fusion E and C series has an integrated DirectX 11 graphics unit, as designated APU, in The.
Graphics chips and processors for consoles
- Xbox 360 (2005)
- Nintendo Wii ( 2006)
- Nintendo Wii U ( 2012)
- Playstation 4 (2013 )
- Xbox One ( 2013)
Chipsets
AMD offers chipsets for various systems.
Graphics chips
Particularly pronounced in AMD's graphics offerings is the PC market. GPUs for standard computers and computer games are called AMD Radeon (formerly ATI Radeon ), which sells for the professional market as AMD FirePro and ATI FireMV. With the HD6XXX series ATI Technologies brand was abandoned, the graphics cards bear the name of AMD Radeon HD6XXX. Prior to AMD, the company had acquired ATI in 2006.
Network chips
Since 1984, AMD Ethernet ICs ago for a variety of different devices. Currently available network chips are based on the AMD PCnet - series.