Advanced Micro Devices, a multinational semiconductor that develops microprocessors, chipsets and graphic processors (ATi). AMD is the second largest microprocessor manufacturer after Intel and has active since 1969.
In 1982 AMD signed a contract with Intel to become a licensed second-source manufacturer. IBM wanted the Intel 8086/8088 but IBM's policy stated that at least two suppliers should be available. This is why the first AMD processors always have 'Intel' printed somewhere. After a while AMD didn't get the license to produce Intel processors anymore and thus AMD started cloning the 386 and launched the Am386. Since the AMD K5, AMD didn't clone the Intel processor but started developing on their own. The K5 wasn't a big success but thanks to NexGen that merged into AMD the K6 could be made.
| For a long time AMD was the underdog to Intel. With the K6-2 AMD did gain market share but it wasn't until Athlon made it's debut. AMD's new Athlon was based on the K6 and all the weaknesses we're fixed. The Athlon matured (read: the motherboards matured) and people saw that the Athlon was flying and getting clock frequencies up to the magical 1GHz barrier. Combined with great performance and good control of manufacturing (Intel had problems manufacturing the fastest breed of Pentium III's) AMD gained a lot in the market. The Athlon, and the Athlon XP, did run hot compared to the Pentium III but that was fixed with the cool running Athlon 64. In fact; the Pentium 4 ran hotter each generation and exceeded the Athlon's power consumption by a great margin. The Athlon 64 stayed strong in the competition until Intel's 'Conroe' (Core 2 Duo) came on board to teach the Athlon a lesson. |  |
AMD has a range of processors today including multi-core Opterons and a good performing quad-core to eight-core for the desktop called the Phenom II and AMD FX.
AMD also acquired ATi to get in-house graphics chips. These are integrated in chipsets to create cheap motherboard solutions. In the future (The Future is Fusion as AMD calls it) the plans are to integrate the graphics chip into the processor. Today AMD offers AMD A4, A6 and A8 CPU's which have a GPU integrated. In general terms they are called APU's (Accelerated Processing Units)
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The list will show every object in my database that has been made by AMD.
