Advanced Micro Devices is about to celebrate its 40th anniversary. It was founded in May 1, 1969 by several former executives of Fairchild Semiconductor and began as a manufacturer of logic chips before venturing into the RAM chip and microprocessor business.

Over the years, AMD has been Intel’s primary competitor in the microprocessor business, although Intel has really dominated the field in recent history. In spite of Intel’s current dominance, AMD still continues to manufacture and develop new chips for tomorrow’s computers.

AMD actually beat Intel in the race for MHz clock speeds, but Intel soon overtook that and eventually left AMD’s processors chips behind in terms of performance.

AMD also considered energy-efficiency in processor design before Intel did, but again, Intel eventually gained the upper hand.

Currently, AMD is also the third-largest supplier of graphics chips behind Nvidia and (again) Intel.
If there is one thing that AMD always had going for them, it is the fact that their processors are cheaper than the established competition. Of course, you can’t keep on selling chips mainly by touting the cheaper price so performance has to pick up if AMD wants to stay in the game. Here’s to hoping for 40 more years of innovation for the world’s other chipmaker. We don’t want an Intel monopoly after all…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 at 10:13 am and is filed under Business, Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.