History of AMD CPUs As Fast As Possible
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2016-05-06
·
1,283 words · ~6 min read
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back in 1974 it was actually a little bit of
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corporate subterfuge that led AMD to
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produce its first ever CPU the am980
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which was essentially a clone of Intel's 8080 that AMD reverse engineered by
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taking a photo of Intel's processor die
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and studying it closely funnily enough though the two chipmakers later came to
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an agreement that had AMD manufacturing Intel designed CPUs as a Second Source
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which was important to Intel's customers at the time as they wanted to be able to
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buy their parts even if something went wrong at Intel itself thus began a sort
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of strange symbiotic relationship between Intel and AMD where they both
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shared technology with each other but competed in the marketplace at the same
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time indeed as part of the Second Source
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Arrangement Intel licensed out the x86 architecture to AMD in 1976 when which
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is what allows AMD to design and manufacture IBM compatible CPUs to this
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very day however Intel ended AMD's
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license to print money and stopped giving exact Second Source processor
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designs to AMD starting with its widely popular 386 so while AMD still had a
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license for the x86 instruction set it had to fend for itself when it came to
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overall CPU design so while AMD was able
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to clone the 386 and 486 processors for
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reasons of complexity and the timeconsuming process of reverse
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engineering Intel's chips they quickly realized they needed to design their own
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CPUs inhouse and thusly the K5 designed
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to compete with the original Pentium with a clock speed of up to 133 MHz was
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born in 1996 the very next year 1997 was when
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AMD launched the chip that allowed them to become a major player in this CPU
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Wars the k6 with variants called the k62
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and k63 coming shortly thereafter these
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chips competed with Intel's Pentium 2 and Pentium 3 generation CPUs offering
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floating Point capability for better performance in games and multimedia
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while retaining some of the previously enjoyed compatibility with Intel
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designed motherboards due to AMD's aggressive pricing the k6 series
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captured a huge chunk of the mainstream PC market with the k 62 claiming
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According to some sources nearly 70% of the market for PCs under $1,000 at one
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point in 1998 and the train kept on
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rolling with K7 in 1999 better known as
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the Athlon featuring a double data rate front side bus to alleviate previous
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bottlenecking as well as a heavily revamped floating Point Unit to pull
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ahead of the Pentium 3 in speed in certain applications it was also
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depending on who you ask the the first CPU to run at 1 billion cycles per
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second or 1 GHz AMD also pulled some
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clever marketing out of its hat with the 2001 release of the Athlon XP writing on
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the naming of Windows XP to imply optimal compatibility and by Shifting
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the model names of their CPUs from a number that reflects raw frequency to
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the pr rating system using a term like 1900 plus to describe performance
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relative to an earlier Athlon ship at that clock speed or as many press and
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enthusiasts speculated relative to Intel
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over the next 2 years Athlon xp's revisions offered incremental
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improvements but didn't wow the industry though a neat side note is the Athlon MP
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an earlier Intel skull Trail like dual socket platform for power users but in
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2003 AMD made a massive contribution to
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the CPU industry by rolling out the x86
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64 architecture as a feature of its K8
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series of Athlon 64 processors beating
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Intel to the punch on 64-bit Computing for the desktop a groundbreaking enough
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move that Intel ended up licensing AMD's 64-bit instruction set extension rather
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than setting the standard themselves a position they've never really enjoyed
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being in the term amd64 is still used to describe the
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instruction sets of current CPUs from both teams for this reason AMD's other
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huge back-to-back Innovation was to bring multicore processing to the masses
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with the Athlon X2 in 2005 in fact the
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fact that I had an argument with my writer John about whether 64-bit
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processing with its support for large amounts of memory or dual core
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technology enabling parallelization of heavy workloads was more important
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should illustrate just how huge AMD's
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back-to-back industry changing contributions were over this short span
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however the solid days for AMD ended soon after due to significant push back
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from Intel and business decisions that were arguably overaggressive AMD's
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chairman Jerry Sanders III famously said that real men have Fabs in 1994 but AMD
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built so many that they eventually became an albatross around the company's
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neck forcing AMD to sell them just 15
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years later currently AMD doesn't own any of its own Fabs and is somewhat at
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the mercy of external forces as a result
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and although we don't know exactly why AMD's response to the Turning tide has
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been to focus more on core count in subsequent performance CPUs such as the
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phenomx 4 and the FX series which became popular with home PC Builders and on
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adding more powerful onboard Graphics to their apus although many users haven't
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seen enough practical benefit to these features to justify paying the same
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amount that Intel is able to charge reducing AMD's profitability what we
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hope however is that the upcoming Zen architecture will see A Renewed focus on
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single-threaded performance what's important to many enthusiasts and take
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advantage of the smaller manufacturing processes that are finally now available
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at thirdparty chip foundaries as AMD tries to mount another challenge to its
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