AMD

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
Type	Public
Traded as	Nasdaq: AMD
Industry	Semiconductors
Founded	1 May 1969, Sunnyvale, California
Founder	Jerry Sanders, Ed Turney, John Carey, Sven Simonsen, Jack Gifford, Frank Botte, Jim Giles, Larry Stenger
Headquarters	Santa Clara, California, United States
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Lisa Su (chair, president and CEO)
Products	Ryzen, EPYC, Radeon, Instinct, Threadripper, Xilinx FPGAs
Services	Semi-custom silicon design
Subsidiaries	Xilinx, ZT Systems, Silo AI
Website	amd.com

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It develops central processing units, graphics processing units, field-programmable gate arrays, systems on a chip and other high-performance computing components, serving personal computers, gaming, data centres and embedded systems.

AMD was founded in 1969 by Jerry Sanders and seven colleagues from Fairchild Semiconductor. It entered the microprocessor market in 1975 by reverse-engineering Intel's 8080, which led to a cross-licensing agreement permitting it to build legal clones of Intel processors, including the x86 family from 1981. The relationship between the two companies has alternated between partnership and litigation for five decades, and has defined both.

Having come close to insolvency in the early 2010s, AMD recovered under Lisa Su, who became chief executive in 2014, through a combination of a competitive processor architecture in the Ryzen and EPYC lines and a penetration pricing strategy against Intel. In 2022 it surpassed Intel by market capitalisation for the first time.

History

Foundation and early products

Advanced Micro Devices was incorporated on 1 May 1969 by Jerry Sanders together with seven Fairchild Semiconductor colleagues: Ed Turney, John Carey, Sven Simonsen, Jack Gifford and three members of Gifford's team, Frank Botte, Jim Giles and Larry Stenger. Sanders, an electrical engineer who was director of marketing at Fairchild, had grown frustrated with the lack of support and flexibility there, following the example of Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, who had left Fairchild to found Intel in July 1968.

In September 1969 the company moved from temporary premises to a 15,000 square foot headquarters at 901 Thompson Place, Sunnyvale, costing 500,000 dollars and housing the entire business including production of two-inch wafers at seven micrometre feature size.

To establish a customer base quickly, AMD became a second-source supplier of microchips designed by Fairchild and National Semiconductor, concentrating first on logic chips. It guaranteed quality control to United States Military Standard, a meaningful advantage when unreliability was a significant problem for computer, telecommunications and instrument manufacturers.

The first product, the Am9300 four-bit shift register, was manufactured in November 1969 and went on sale in 1970. The Am2501 logic counter, the company's first proprietary design, followed in 1970 and sold well, and the Am2505, the fastest multiplier then available, was the best-selling product of 1971. AMD entered the RAM market in 1971 with the Am3101, a 64-bit bipolar device, and finished that year with total sales of 4.6 million dollars.

The company went public in September 1972 and was a second source for Intel MOS and LSI circuits by 1973. By 1975 it produced 212 products, 49 of them proprietary.

Entry into microprocessors

Intel had created the first microprocessor, the four-bit 4004, in 1971. AMD entered the market in 1975 with the Am9080, a reverse-engineered clone of the Intel 8080, and with the Am2900 bit-slice family. When Intel began installing microcode in its processors in 1976 it entered a cross-licensing agreement granting AMD a copyright licence to that microcode, effective October 1976.

In 1977 AMD formed a joint venture with Siemens, which bought 20 per cent of its stock, providing cash to expand the product range. The two established Advanced Micro Computers in Silicon Valley and Germany, allowing AMD into microcomputer development based on its second-source Zilog Z8000 processors. When the partners' visions diverged AMD bought out the Siemens stake in the American division in 1979 and closed the venture in late 1981, having shifted focus to second-source Intel x86 processors.

Sales passed 100 million dollars in fiscal 1978, and AMD listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1979. Production began that year at a new fabrication plant in Austin, Texas, adding to overseas assembly facilities in Penang and Manila, with construction starting on a San Antonio plant in 1981.

The Intel agreement

Intel introduced the first x86 microprocessors in 1978. When IBM created its personal computer in 1981 it wanted Intel's x86 processors but required a second source, in line with its policy of not depending on a single supplier for critical components.

Intel and AMD accordingly signed a ten-year technology exchange agreement in October 1981, executed in February 1982. Each company could earn the right to manufacture and sell a product developed by the other by exchanging manufacturing rights to a product of equivalent technical complexity, with technical information and licences exchanged for a royalty. The agreement extended the 1976 cross-licence through 1995, provided for arbitration of disputes and allowed either party to terminate after five years on a year's notice. Critically, in the event of AMD's bankruptcy or takeover the cross-licence would be cancelled, a provision that shaped AMD's strategic options for decades.

From 1982 AMD produced second-source 8086, 8088, 80186 and 80188 processors, and by 1984 its own Am286 clone of the 80286, for the rapidly growing market in IBM PCs and compatibles.

The company continued heavy research spending and produced the world's first 512K EPROM in 1984. That year it was listed in The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America, and it entered the Fortune 500 for the first time in 1985.

Mid-1980s crisis

By mid-1985 the microchip market was in severe downturn, caused principally by aggressive Japanese trade practices including dumping, and compounded by a crowded and insufficiently innovative American chip market.

AMD responded on two fronts. It devised the Liberty Chip programme, designing and manufacturing one new chip or chipset every week for 52 weeks in fiscal 1986, and it lobbied the United States government intensively until sanctions and restrictions were imposed against predatory Japanese pricing. The company withdrew from the DRAM market and made progress in CMOS, which it had been slow to adopt having concentrated on bipolar devices.

It had some success with the AMD7910 and AMD7911 World Chip modem, among the first multi-standard devices covering both Bell and CCITT tones, and from 1986 embraced the industry's shift toward RISC with the Am29000, which survived as an embedded processor.

Building its own processors

Intel decided internally in 1984 to stop supplying AMD with product information, and delayed and eventually refused to convey the technical details of the 80386. AMD invoked arbitration in 1987, and Intel responded by cancelling the 1982 agreement altogether.

Deprived of Intel designs, AMD was forced to develop its own. In March 1991 it released the Am386, a clean-room design compatible with the Intel 386, selling one million units by October. The Am486 family followed in 1993 and proved popular with original equipment manufacturers including Compaq, which signed an exclusive agreement to use it. The Am5x86 arrived in November 1995.

Under an agreement effective 1996 AMD received rights to the microcode in Intel's 386 and 486 families but not to later generations.

AMD's first wholly in-house x86 processor was the K5, launched in 1996. The K referred to kryptonite, the substance harmful to Superman, an unsubtle characterisation of Intel's dominance. The number five denoted the fifth generation of x86 processors, which Intel had branded Pentium after the trademark office ruled that bare numbers could not be trademarked.

In January 1996 AMD acquired NexGen for 857 million dollars, principally for its Nx series of x86-compatible designs. The company gave the NexGen team its own building, left it alone and funded the rework of the Nx686, producing the K6 in 1997. Although based on Socket 7, variants such as the K6-III/450 outperformed Intel's sixth-generation Pentium II.

The K7 debuted as the Athlon on 23 June 1999. Licensing restrictions around Intel's Slot 1 connector meant it could not use the same motherboards, and AMD adopted Slot A, referenced to the Alpha processor bus. The Duron was a lower-cost Athlon with reduced cache, later replaced by the Sempron. The Athlon XP followed on 9 October 2001.

Athlon 64 and Opteron

The K8 was a substantial revision of the K7 and the high point of AMD's first period of technical leadership. Its notable features were a 64-bit extension to the x86 instruction set, known as x86-64, AMD64 or x64; an on-chip memory controller; and HyperTransport, a high-performance point-to-point interconnect, as part of what AMD called Direct Connect Architecture.

The significance of AMD64 was strategic as well as technical. Intel had pursued 64-bit computing through Itanium, an entirely new architecture incompatible with existing software. AMD instead extended x86, preserving compatibility, and the market chose AMD's approach. Intel was ultimately obliged to adopt it, and the instruction set in nearly every desktop and server processor sold today is AMD's design.

The technology launched as the Opteron server processor on 22 April 2003 and shortly afterwards as the desktop Athlon 64. AMD released the first dual-core Opteron on 21 April 2005 and the Athlon 64 X2, the first dual-core desktop family, a month later.

The first K10 server Opterons appeared in September 2007, followed by the Phenom for desktops in November, in dual-, triple- and quad-core versions on a single die. AMD built the Spider platform around them, but manufactured at 65 nanometres against Intel's smaller and more power-efficient 45 nanometre process, and was not competitive. The Phenom II of January 2009, built at 45 nanometres, resolved the original's low clock speeds, small L3 cache and a power management bug, and added a memory controller supporting DDR3, but still did not match Intel's mid-to-high-range Core 2 Quad parts. The six-core Thuban followed in April 2010 with turbo core technology switching between six cores and three faster ones.

Difficult years, 2006 to 2014

On 24 July 2006 AMD announced the acquisition of the Canadian graphics company ATI Technologies for 4.3 billion dollars in cash and 58 million shares, approximately 5.4 billion dollars in total, completing on 25 October. The purchase gave AMD a graphics capability that later proved essential, but the price and the debt incurred weighed heavily for years. The ATI brand was retired in favour of AMD in August 2010.

In October 2008 AMD announced that it would spin off its manufacturing operations as GlobalFoundries, a joint venture with Advanced Technology Investment Company, an investment vehicle of the government of Abu Dhabi. The transaction provided cash and allowed AMD to concentrate on design. Chief executive Hector Ruiz stepped down in July 2008, remaining executive chairman before becoming chairman of GlobalFoundries in March 2009, and the president and chief operating officer Dirk Meyer became chief executive. Recessionary losses required 1,100 job cuts in 2009.

Rory Read, formerly of Lenovo, replaced Meyer as chief executive in August 2011. In November 2011 AMD announced the loss of more than 1,400 jobs, over ten per cent of its workforce, and in October 2012 a further 15 per cent. The inclusion of AMD semi-custom chips in the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One was later widely credited with saving the company from bankruptcy, providing predictable volume revenue through its worst period. AMD acquired the low-power server manufacturer SeaMicro in early 2012.

Recovery under Lisa Su

On 8 October 2014 AMD announced that Rory Read had stepped down after three years and would be succeeded by Lisa Su, who had been chief operating officer since June. Su, a semiconductor engineer with a doctorate from MIT, restructured the company around a long-term bet on a new processor architecture rather than on immediate cost reduction.

Effective 1 July 2014 AMD reorganised into two business groups: Computing and Graphics, covering desktop and notebook processors, chipsets, discrete GPUs and professional graphics; and Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom, covering server and embedded processors, dense servers, semi-custom systems on a chip including game console solutions, engineering services and royalties. A further seven per cent of the global workforce was cut by the end of 2014.

The Zen architecture, launched as Ryzen for desktops and EPYC for servers, restored AMD's competitiveness from 2017 onward, aided by manufacturing at TSMC on process nodes ahead of Intel's own troubled fabrication roadmap.

In August 2016 AMD's 47 years in Sunnyvale ended when it leased a 220,000 square foot headquarters at Santa Clara Square, facing Intel's headquarters across the Bayshore Freeway, and agreed to sell 1 AMD Place to the Irvine Company, which received approval in April 2019 to demolish it and redevelop the 32-acre site as housing.

Data centre and artificial intelligence, 2020 onward

In October 2020 AMD announced the acquisition of Xilinx, the market leader in field-programmable gate arrays and complex programmable logic devices, in an all-stock transaction. It completed in February 2022 at an estimated 50 billion dollars, the largest acquisition in the semiconductor industry at the time. AMD discontinued production of all CPLDs acquired through Xilinx in January 2024.

A rally in semiconductor stocks pushed AMD's valuation above 300 billion dollars for the first time in March 2024. In July 2024 it agreed to acquire the Finnish artificial intelligence company Silo AI for 665 million dollars in cash, and in August 2024 ZT Systems, which builds custom computing infrastructure for artificial intelligence workloads, for 4.9 billion dollars.

AMD made substantial gains in the server processor market from early 2024. As of July 2025 Intel held 63.3 per cent and AMD 36.5 per cent, a strong upward trend against a continuing Intel lead. In June 2025 AMD unveiled the MI400 series for 2026 and a server platform named Helios.

In October 2025 the company announced an agreement with OpenAI to supply six gigawatts of artificial intelligence processors over five years. Under the arrangement OpenAI has the option to acquire approximately ten per cent of AMD, 160 million shares at a nominal one cent each, contingent on undisclosed performance targets, with the final tranche requiring AMD stock to reach 600 dollars.

Manufacturing

AMD originally produced its chips in company-owned foundries, collaborating with IBM and Motorola on production technology in what Jerry Sanders termed the Virtual Gorilla strategy, intended to compete with Intel's far greater fabrication investment.

The 2008 spin-off of GlobalFoundries reflected the rising cost of each successive process node, which had become unsupportable for a company of AMD's size. The Emirate of Abu Dhabi acquired the new company through ATIC, purchasing AMD's final stake in 2009 and leaving AMD a fabless designer.

Part of the spin-off agreement committed AMD to produce a volume of products at GlobalFoundries, but it has also used TSMC and Samsung, reducing dependence on any single foundry. From 2018 AMD began shifting processor and graphics production to TSMC after GlobalFoundries halted development of its 7 nanometre process, and in 2019 revised its wafer purchase requirement to allow free choice of foundry at 7 nanometres and below while maintaining commitments at 12 nanometres and above through 2021.

Controversies

Litigation with Intel

AMD's relationship with Intel has produced litigation across five decades.

In 1986 Intel broke the agreement permitting AMD to produce its microchips for IBM. AMD filed for arbitration in 1987 and the arbitrator found in its favour in 1992. Intel disputed the decision, and in 1994 the Supreme Court of California upheld the arbitrator and awarded damages for breach of contract.

In 1990 Intel brought a copyright action alleging illegal use of its 287 microcode. The case ended in 1994 with a jury finding for AMD and its right to use Intel microcode through the 486 generation.

In 1997 Intel sued AMD and Cyrix over use of the term MMX. The parties settled, AMD acknowledging MMX as an Intel trademark and Intel granting AMD rights to market the K6 MMX processor.

The most significant action concerned competition law. Following an investigation, the Japan Fair Trade Commission found Intel guilty of a number of violations, and AMD won an antitrust suit in Japan on 27 June 2005. The same day it filed a broad antitrust complaint in the United States District Court for the District of Delaware, alleging systematic use of secret rebates, special discounts and threats to exclude AMD processors from the global market. The court issued subpoenas to major computer manufacturers including Acer, Dell, Lenovo, HP and Toshiba.

In November 2009 Intel agreed to pay AMD 1.25 billion dollars and to renew a five-year patent cross-licence as part of a settlement of all outstanding disputes. Related regulatory proceedings in the European Union resulted in a separate and much larger fine against Intel.

Superfund sites

Two former AMD fabrication sites in Sunnyvale are listed as Superfund sites, added in 1986 and 1990 after volatile organic compounds were found in groundwater. Acid neutralisation system tank vaults were found to have holes when excavated along with the contaminated soil. The contamination is part of a wider pattern in the Santa Clara Valley, where early semiconductor manufacturing left one of the highest concentrations of Superfund sites in the United States.

Security vulnerabilities

AMD processors have been affected by several classes of speculative execution vulnerability disclosed from 2018 onward, including variants of Spectre, although the company's designs were not susceptible to Meltdown in the form that affected Intel. Subsequent disclosures including Inception and the Zenbleed flaw in Zen 2 processors required microcode updates that in some cases carried performance costs. The company's handling of disclosure timelines has occasionally been criticised by security researchers.

Corporate responsibility

AMD reported a 19 per cent reduction in Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions in 2022 compared with 2020, on third-party verified calculations at limited assurance level. It was a founding member of The Green Grid, established with IBM, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft to reduce power consumption in computing grids.

On 31 August 2011 in Austin, AMD achieved a Guinness World Record for the highest frequency of a computer processor at 8.429 GHz, running an eight-core FX-8150 with a single active module cooled with liquid helium. The record was subsequently extended by the overclocker Andre Yang to 8.461 GHz in November 2011 and 8.794 GHz in November 2012.

References

External links

Official website