Advanced Micro Devices

37.382222-121.970833Coordinates: 37° 22′ 56″ N, 121° 58′ 15″ W

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is a U.S. semiconductor company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. AMD develops and sells computer chips, microprocessors, chipsets, graphics processing units (GPUs) and system-on-a-chip (SoC) solutions. In this way, the company addresses the B2B sector specifically to the computer and communications industry, but also directly to consumers. AMD has been fabless since it spun off its actual semiconductor manufacturing operations into Globalfoundries in 2009. The company has been listed on the Standard & Poors 500 stock index since March 20, 2017, employs about 11,400 people worldwide, and is the second largest x86 processor manufacturer in the world after Intel (as of 2011). The company's shares were traded on the New York Stock Exchange from 1979 to 2014, and have been listed on NASDAQ since January 2, 2015.

History

AMD was founded on May 1, 1969 under the name "Sanders Association" by Jerry Sanders III and Ed Turney. The start-up capital 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 was launched in 1970.

From 1973 onwards, expansion into countries outside the USA began, with a plant being built in Penang in Malaysia. In 1975 AMD started the production of memory chips and in 1979 the company went public. In the same year, a license was acquired from Intel to produce the 8086 and 8088 processors. When this was terminated in 1986, it led to a legal dispute in which AMD was forbidden to produce replicas of Intel's processors from the 5th generation onwards (80586 - Intel Pentium) in an out-of-court settlement. AMD then developed their own architectures, the first being the AMD K5. With the takeover of the CPU manufacturer NexGen in 1996, AMD created the technological and personnel basis for further developments. For the production of the chips the Fab30 was opened in Dresden in 1998 and the Fab36 in 2004. In the meantime, the CPU manufacturer Alchemy, which produced high-end low-power embedded processors with MIPS architecture, had been taken over.

Also in 2004, the joint venture Fujitsu AMD Semiconductor Limited, founded in 1993 with Fujitsu, was renamed Spansion. The entire flash production was transferred from AMD and Fujitsu to Spansion. At the end of 2005, Spansion was then completely spun off as a separate public limited company, as the division was making ongoing losses.

In 2006, AMD acquired ATI Technologies, a leading supplier of computer graphics chips at that time. In the semiconductor industry, this takeover was considered unprecedented due to the special constellations (hardly any direct competition between these companies, different research areas). This takeover enables AMD, like its main competitor Intel, to supply important computer components "from a single source".

On 8 September 2008, AMD CEO Dirk Meyer told the US business magazine Fortune that AMD was "going to go away from a captive fab model to more of a fabless model". Thus, the economic separation of the manufacturing plants was on its way. In October 2008, AMD announced that it would spin off its chip fabs into a foundry run in conjunction with Abu Dhabi-based Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC). In March 2009, the official name of the spun-off division was announced: Globalfoundries

In January 2011, Dirk Meyer stepped down from his functions at AMD. After months of provisional leadership by CFO Thomas Seifert, AMD appointed former Lenovo manager Rory P. Read as its new CEO in August 2011. In October 2014, Lisa Su became his successor.

On February 29, 2012, AMD acquired microserver specialist SeaMicro to gain a better foothold in the server market.

See also

• List of microprocessors from AMD
• AMD Embedded Solutions