back in 1974 it was actually a little bit of
corporate subterfuge that led AMD to
produce its first ever CPU the am980
which was essentially a clone of Intel's 8080 that AMD reverse engineered by
taking a photo of Intel's processor die
and studying it closely funnily enough though the two chipmakers later came to
an agreement that had AMD manufacturing Intel designed CPUs as a Second Source
which was important to Intel's customers at the time as they wanted to be able to
buy their parts even if something went wrong at Intel itself thus began a sort
of strange symbiotic relationship between Intel and AMD where they both
shared technology with each other but competed in the marketplace at the same
time indeed as part of the Second Source
Arrangement Intel licensed out the x86 architecture to AMD in 1976 when which
is what allows AMD to design and manufacture IBM compatible CPUs to this
very day however Intel ended AMD's
license to print money and stopped giving exact Second Source processor
designs to AMD starting with its widely popular 386 so while AMD still had a
license for the x86 instruction set it had to fend for itself when it came to
overall CPU design so while AMD was able
to clone the 386 and 486 processors for
reasons of complexity and the timeconsuming process of reverse
engineering Intel's chips they quickly realized they needed to design their own
CPUs inhouse and thusly the K5 designed
to compete with the original Pentium with a clock speed of up to 133 MHz was
born in 1996 the very next year 1997 was when
AMD launched the chip that allowed them to become a major player in this CPU
Wars the k6 with variants called the k62
and k63 coming shortly thereafter these
chips competed with Intel's Pentium 2 and Pentium 3 generation CPUs offering
floating Point capability for better performance in games and multimedia
while retaining some of the previously enjoyed compatibility with Intel
designed motherboards due to AMD's aggressive pricing the k6 series
captured a huge chunk of the mainstream PC market with the k 62 claiming
According to some sources nearly 70% of the market for PCs under $1,000 at one
point in 1998 and the train kept on
rolling with K7 in 1999 better known as
the Athlon featuring a double data rate front side bus to alleviate previous
bottlenecking as well as a heavily revamped floating Point Unit to pull
ahead of the Pentium 3 in speed in certain applications it was also
depending on who you ask the the first CPU to run at 1 billion cycles per
second or 1 GHz AMD also pulled some
clever marketing out of its hat with the 2001 release of the Athlon XP writing on
the naming of Windows XP to imply optimal compatibility and by Shifting
the model names of their CPUs from a number that reflects raw frequency to
the pr rating system using a term like 1900 plus to describe performance
relative to an earlier Athlon ship at that clock speed or as many press and
enthusiasts speculated relative to Intel
over the next 2 years Athlon xp's revisions offered incremental
improvements but didn't wow the industry though a neat side note is the Athlon MP
an earlier Intel skull Trail like dual socket platform for power users but in
2003 AMD made a massive contribution to
the CPU industry by rolling out the x86
64 architecture as a feature of its K8
series of Athlon 64 processors beating
Intel to the punch on 64-bit Computing for the desktop a groundbreaking enough
move that Intel ended up licensing AMD's 64-bit instruction set extension rather
than setting the standard themselves a position they've never really enjoyed
being in the term amd64 is still used to describe the
instruction sets of current CPUs from both teams for this reason AMD's other
huge back-to-back Innovation was to bring multicore processing to the masses
with the Athlon X2 in 2005 in fact the
fact that I had an argument with my writer John about whether 64-bit
processing with its support for large amounts of memory or dual core
technology enabling parallelization of heavy workloads was more important
should illustrate just how huge AMD's
back-to-back industry changing contributions were over this short span
however the solid days for AMD ended soon after due to significant push back
from Intel and business decisions that were arguably overaggressive AMD's
chairman Jerry Sanders III famously said that real men have Fabs in 1994 but AMD
built so many that they eventually became an albatross around the company's
neck forcing AMD to sell them just 15
years later currently AMD doesn't own any of its own Fabs and is somewhat at
the mercy of external forces as a result
and although we don't know exactly why AMD's response to the Turning tide has
been to focus more on core count in subsequent performance CPUs such as the
phenomx 4 and the FX series which became popular with home PC Builders and on
adding more powerful onboard Graphics to their apus although many users haven't
seen enough practical benefit to these features to justify paying the same
amount that Intel is able to charge reducing AMD's profitability what we
hope however is that the upcoming Zen architecture will see A Renewed focus on
single-threaded performance what's important to many enthusiasts and take
advantage of the smaller manufacturing processes that are finally now available
at thirdparty chip foundaries as AMD tries to mount another challenge to its
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