How does AMD work?

Question

I have been a faithful Intel user for a while and mostly because I'm not sure how AMD works. they don't seem to ever have the GHz measurment on them. what is the order of them? (ex: Celeron, Pentium 1, pentium 2 pentium 3.... and so on, except in AMD) what is AMD's version of the Core 2 Duo, and is it better than Intel's?

Answer 1

AMD has shorter thread paths then Intel, hence why AMD is always gonna be a little faster then what they rate the clock at. AMD x2 would be Intel's dual core processor version... They both have there advantages really. Now that Intel uses EM64T, which is a virtual 64 bit memory, they are getting closer to beating AMD. But with AMD's full implementation of the replacement of the FSB with the HyperTransport bus it will be a little more difficult. But there are some ways that Intel do have the advantage like there individual L2 cache per core, speedstep technology and smartcache.. It is a very close call atm.. All you have to do to find out the clock speed is to just look up the specs on the processor at Newegg or something likethat.. Its not like there trying to hide anything.. Another plus with AMD is price, at most cases it is much cheaper then Intel..

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Answer 9

(abbreviated AMD; NYSE: AMD) is an American manufacturer of integrated circuits based in Sunnyvale, California. It is the second-largest supplier of x86-compatible processors, and was once a leading supplier of non-volatile flash memory. It was founded in 1969 by a group of former executives from Fairchild Semiconductor, including Jerry Sanders, III. AMD's current Chairman and CEO is Dr. Héctor Ruiz. The current president and Chief Operating Officer is Dirk Meyer.

AMD is 7th among the Worldwide Top 20 Semiconductor Sales Leaders with revenues in 2006 of $7.471 billion.

AMD is best known for the Athlon, Opteron, Turion 64, Sempron, and Duron lines of x86-compatible processors, in addition to its line of ATI-branded Radeon graphics products.

On July 24, 2006, AMD reached an agreement to merge with ATI at a cost of $5.4 billion, subject to ATI shareholder, court, and regulatory approval. The merger closed on October 25, 2006.[1]

Contents [hide]
1 Financial information
2 General history
3 Production History
3.1 8086, 80286, 80386, Am486
3.2 K5
3.3 NexGen / K6
3.4 Athlon / K7
3.5 AMD64 / K8
3.6 Ext. AMD64 / K8L
3.7 AMD Fusion
4 Other productions
4.1 Geode Processors
4.2 Alchemy Processors
4.3 Pacifica Technology
4.4 AMD Live!
4.5 Torrenza
4.6 AMD Quad FX platform
5 Production / Fabrication Plants
6 Current production
7 Partnerships
8 Flash technology
9 Lawsuits against Intel Corporation
10 Merger with ATI
11 See also
12 External links
12.1 Official websites
12.2 Key information about AMD
12.3 Production history
12.3.1 Future productions
12.4 Other productions
12.4.1 Pacifica and virtualization
12.5 US antitrust case against Intel
12.6 Merger with ATi
12.7 Partnerships



[edit] Financial information
In September of 2006, its market capitalization stands around US$13.20 billion. The integrated circuits company is based in Sunnyvale, California.

It is the second-largest supplier of x86-compatible processors, the largest supplier of discrete graphics products, and owns a 37% share of leading supplier of non-volatile flash memory, Spansion.

AMD was founded in 1969 by a group of former staffs from Fairchild Semiconductor, including Jerry Sanders, III. The current Chairman and CEO is Dr. Héctor Ruiz and the current president and Chief Operating Officer is Dirk Meyer.


[edit] General history

Early AMD 8080 Processor (AMD AM9080ADC / C8080A), 1977The company started as a producer of logic chips in 1969, then entered the RAM chip business in 1975. That same year, it introduced a reverse-engineered clone of the Intel 8080 microprocessor. During this period, AMD also designed and produced a series of bit-slice processor elements (Am2900, Am29116, Am293xx) which were used in various minicomputer designs.

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During this time, AMD attempted to embrace the perceived shift towards RISC with their own AMD 29K processor, and they attempted to diversify into graphics and audio devices as well as flash memory. It had some success in the mid-80s with the AMD7910 and AMD7911 "World Chip" FSK modem, one of the first multistandard devices that covered both Bell and CCITT tones at up to 1200 baud half duplex or 300/300 full duplex. While the AMD 29K survived as an embedded processor and AMD spinoff Spansion continues to make industry leading flash memory, AMD was not as successful with its other endeavors. AMD decided to switch gears and concentrate solely on Intel-compatible microprocessors and flash memory. This put them in direct competition with Intel for x86 compatible processors and their flash memory secondary markets.





[edit] Production History

[edit] 8086, 80286, 80386, Am486

AMD 80286 1982In February 1982, AMD signed a contract with Intel, becoming a licensed second-source manufacturer of 8086 and 8088 processors. IBM wanted to use the Intel 8088 in its IBM PC, but IBM's policy at the time was to require at least two sources for its chips. AMD later produced the 80286, or 286, under the same arrangement, but Intel cancelled the agreement in 1986, and refused to convey technical details of the i386 part. The growing popularity of the PC clone market meant Intel could produce CPUs on its own terms, rather than IBM's.

AMD challenged this decision, and subsequently won under arbitration. A long legal dispute followed, ending in 1991 when the Supreme Court of California sided with AMD and forced Intel to pay over $1 billion in compensation for violation of contract. Subsequent legal disputes centered on whether AMD had legal rights to use derivatives of Intel's microcode. Rulings were made in both directions. In the face of uncertainty, AMD was forced to develop "clean room" versions of Intel code. In this fashion, one engineering team described the function of the code, and a second team without access to the source code itself had to develop microcode that performed the same functionality.

In 1991 AMD released the Am386, its clone of the Intel 80386 processor. It took less than a year for AMD to sell a million units. AMD's 386DX-40 was very popular with smaller, independent PC manufacturers. AMD followed in 1993 with the Am486. Both sold at a significantly lower price than the Intel versions. The Am486 was used by a number of large OEMs, including Compaq, and proved popular. But as product cycles shortened in the PC industry, reverse engineering of Intel's products became an ever less viable strategy for AMD, as it meant their technology would always be behind Intel.

On December 30, 1994 the Supreme Court of California finally formally denied AMD rights to use the i386's microcode. Afterwards AMD and Intel concluded an agreement, the details of which remain largely secret, which gave AMD the right to produce and sell microprocessors containing the microcodes of Intel 286, 386, and 486. The agreement appears to allow for full cross-licensing of patents and some copyrights, allowing each partner to use the other's technological innovations without charge. Whatever the details, no significant legal action had resulted between AMD and Intel (until the 2005 antitrust suits in Japan and the U.S.), and the agreement evidently has not provided a "clean break".


[edit] K5
AMD's first completely in-house x86 processor was the K5, launched belatedly in 1995. The "K" was a reference to "Kryptonite" which from comic book lore was the only substance that could harm Superman (a clear reference to Intel which was dominant in the market).

It was intended to compete directly with the Intel Pentium CPU, which had been released in 1993, but architecturally it had more in common with the newly released Pentium Pro than the Pentium or Cyrix's 6x86, decoding x86 instructions into micro-ops and executing them on a RISC core. There were a number of problems. Many consumers were upset to learn the clock speed of their processor did not match the PR rating used to label some of the parts, and this was especially obvious at boot time, when the clock speed was displayed on the screen during POST on many systems.

More tellingly, the K5 could not match the 6x86's integer performance, nor the Pentium's FPU performance. AMD tended to use benchmarks for its rating systems that avoided FPU intensive tasks. This, combined with the large die size and the fact that the design scaled badly, doomed the K5 to near-total failure in the marketplace. To its credit, the K5 did not suffer from the compatibility problems of the 6x86 nor did it run as hot.

While the K5 was arguably better than the Pentium classic technologically, with modern features such as out of order execution and micro-ops RISC core, AMD was slow by two years compared to Intel. Missing schedule deadlines and lack of manufacturing expertise in scaling designs would continue to plague AMD until the K7. With a new fabrication plant in Austin, they could not afford to wait for another inhouse design.


[edit] NexGen / K6

AMD-K6-2-300In 1996, AMD purchased NexGen specifically for the rights to their Nx series of x86 compatible processors. It is fair to say the technology gained in this acquisition saved AMD, which is somewhat ironic when one considers NexGen had been founded by ex-Intel employees.

AMD gave the NexGen design team their own building, left them alone, and gave them time and money to rework the Nx686. The result was branded the K6 processor, introduced in 1997. The redesign included a feedback dynamic instruction reordering mechanism, MMX instructions, and added the missing floating point unit (FPU). It was also made pin-compatible with Intel's Pentium, enabling it to be used in the widely available "Socket 7"-based motherboards. Like the Nx686 and Nx586 before it, the K6 translated the Pentium compatible x86 instruction set to RISC-like micro-instructions. In the following year, AMD released the K6-2 which added a set of floating point multimedia instructions called 3DNow!, preceding Intel's SSE instructions, as well as a new socket standard called "Super Socket 7", that extended the front side bus frequency from 66 to 100 MHz.

In January 1999, the final iteration of the K6-x series, the 450 MHz K6-III, was extremely competitive with Intel's top of the line chips. This chip was essentially a K6-2 with 256 kilobytes of full-speed level 2 cache integrated into the core and a better branch prediction unit. While it matched (generally beating) the Pentium II/III in integer operations, the FPU was a non-pipelined serial design and could not compete with Intel's more advanced FPU architecture. Although 3DNow! could theoretically compensate for this weakness, few game developers made use of it, the most notable exception being id Software's Quake II. The AMD K6-III was unique in that it was one of the first CPUs with 3 levels of cache. The previous K6-2 utilized an off-die (motherboard) cache. With the introduction of the on-die L2 cache, AMD designed the K6-III to also incorporate the motherboard's pipeline cache to boast an L1, L2 and L3 cache.

Throughout its lifetime, the K6 processor came close, but never equalled the performance of processor offerings from Intel. While there were brief periods when AMD announced a clock speed advantage, volume availability of products was limited as AMD suffered from manufacturing and yield problems. Furthermore, having deviated from the official Intel motherboard specifications with the Super Socket 7 format, the motherboards that worked with the K6 were of varying quality, especially in regards to their implementation of the graphical AGP specification.

Overall the K6 proved popular with consumers, especially in markets outside North America, offering decent performance and a comparatively low price. But the problems surrounding the platform, and lack of availability for the announced high end parts, failed to establish AMD as a player in the corporate market. Intel responded to AMD's lower prices with the lower budget "Celeron" version of their Pentiums. While the Celerons were not as popular as Intel had hoped, this effectively left AMD struggling with low margins, chasing the low end of the market.


[edit] Athlon / K7
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AMD Athlon "Classic" SlotACEO and founder Jerry Sanders developed strategic partnerships to improve AMD's presence in the PC market based on the success of the K6 architecture. One major partnership, announced [2] in 1998 paired AMD with semiconductor giant Motorola. In the announcement, Sanders referred to the partnership as creating a "virtual gorilla" that would enable AMD to compete with Intel on fabrication capacity while limiting AMD's financial outlay for new facilities.

This partnership also helped to co-develop copper-based semiconductor technology, which would become a cornerstone of the K7 production process.

In August of 1999, AMD released the Athlon (K7) processor. Notably, the design team was led by Dirk Meyer, one of the lead engineers on the DEC Alpha project. Jerry Sanders had approached many of the engineering staff to work for AMD as DEC wound the project down, and brought in a near-complete team of engineering experts. The balance of the Athlon design team was comprised of AMD K5 and K6 veterans.

The Athlon had a novel performance oriented micro-architecture, backed by a powerful FPU. The Athlon attempted to reduce bottlenecks that AMD viewed as inherent in the Intel P6 design. The Athlon had a higher average execution per clock throughput. The increased throughput versus the P6 was possible because of fabrication processes permitting increases in transistor density for the Athlon processor. Early samples of the Athlon had branch prediction problems and lower clock rates than the P6. The final production chips fixed these early problems, and offered performance increases over Intel's architecture.

Intel immediately engaged in a near complete re-design of the P6 core, to eliminate the pipeline stalls that had reduced its performance. The result was the "Coppermine" series. However, the sudden revision and necessary line re-tooling put pressure on Intel's manufacturing facilities. Early availability of Coppermine chips was limited.

Working with Motorola as part of the "Virtual Gorilla" strategy, AMD was able to refine copper interconnect manufacturing to the production stage about one year before Intel. The revised process permitted 180-nanometer processor production. The accompanying die-shrink resulted in lower power consumption, permitting AMD to increase Athlon clock-speeds to the 1 gigahertz range [3]. AMD found processor yields on the new process exceeded expectations, and delivered high speed chips in volume in March 2000. Intel announced a 1-GHz Pentium a few days after AMD did, but was unable to ship the part in volume for several months. Intel's attempt to leapfrog AMD with a 1.13-GHz Pentium III resulted in a product that worked reliably only on certain motherboards and was panned by prominent industry critics [4]. That chip was withdrawn from the market, having been installed in only a handful of OEM systems [5]. AMD's success bolstered their reputation as a viable competitor and rival to Intel.

AMD worked to increase the reliability and performance of motherboards for the Athlon with a quality assurance program. Working down from their strength in the performance end of the market, AMD was able to release a line of budget processors based on the Athlon core called the Duron. AMD continued to undercut Intel on price at the low end with the K6, as Intel suffered part shortages and yield problems. Recognition of AMD's price/performance strength by mainstream and enthusiast media helped push AMD's market share as high as 23%.

The success of the Athlon processor diminished as Intel introduced the Pentium 4 processor. Though the Athlon was capable of much greater clock speeds than the Pentium 3 line, the new Netburst architecture, designed to deliver increased performance through deep-pipelines and high-clock-speeds began to match and outpace the Athlon line. Early Pentium-4 chips did not reach Intel's anticipated performance levels, and the Athlon XP remained performance-competitive until the release of the Pentium 4 Northwood CPU.

Unable to compete with the raw clock speeds offered by the P4, from the start of the Athlon XP era, AMD returned to a nomenclature that compared approximate performance of Athlon XP chips with the clock speeds of Pentium-series processors.


[edit] AMD64 / K8
The K8 is a major revision of the K7 architecture, with the most notable features being the addition of a 64-bit extension to the x86 instruction set (called AMD64), the incorporation of an on-chip memory controller, and the implementation of an extremely high performance point to point interconnect called HyperTransport, as part of a Direct Connect Architecture.

This move by AMD was timed to take advantage of a "product hole" in Intel's roadmap, namely a Pentium-compatible CPU that can deal with the inevitable transition to 64 bits. Some viewed this transition as slightly premature; however, AMD was able to define the standard in Intel's absence. AMD's high performance 32-bit application compatibility made it a feasible chip even for home users. The AMD64 standard was adopted by Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, and was quickly supported by the GNU/Linux and BSD communities. This left Intel in a position where they were forced to license the AMD64 extensions for their own 64-bit (EM64T) processors.

The Opteron is the server version of the K8. AMD designed the Opteron to compete against Intel's IA-64 Itanium architecture, but the failure of the IA-64 project to leverage volume sales means that the Opteron now competes with Intel's AMD64-compatible Xeon processor series.

On April 21, 2005 AMD released the first dual core x86 server chip. The initial release were accompanied by the availability of the Opteron 865, 870, 875, 880 and 885 processors, and the 2xx version soon followed.

On May 31, 2005 AMD released its first desktop-based dual core processor family — the Athlon 64 X2. Unlike Intel's early (Pentium D) dual-core design, the X2 mates two cores into a single chip, rather than two chips into a single package. Intel's method may have theoretical yield advantages, but gives up some performance advantages since interprocessor communication still happens over external pins, rather than internally. The X2 improves upon the performance of the original Athlon 64, especially for multi-threaded software applications. The overall increase in performance of the entry level Athlon 64 X2 chip (the Athlon 64 X2 3800+) over the fastest single-core Athlon 64 chip (the Athlon 64 3800+) is almost 10%. The spread between the latter and the Athlon 64 X2 5000+ is almost 40%[6]. Almost a year later, Intel developed the Core 2 Duo processor family which, like the Athlon 64 X2, incorporates two processing cores into a single chip.

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To compete with Intel's advantage in memory bandwidth, AMD recently released a new socket dubbed "Socket AM2". Socket AM2 CPUs uses DDR2 memory instead of the older DDR memory used in earlier Socket 754 and Socket 939 compatible processors. The last microprocessor minor revision based on K8 architecture (Revision F) is due in the form of Socket S1 mobile chips (Turions) in May 2006. Socket AM2 released in May 23, 2006 including the support for the DDR2 memory standard.

On May 18, 2006, Dell announced that it would roll out new servers based on AMD's Opteron chips by the end of 2006, thus ending an exclusive relationship with supplier Intel Corporation. Dell said it would include Opterons only in 'high-end servers with four processors'. With the announcement, AMD will supply every major PC manufacturer with server chips by the end of 2006. On September 13, 2006 Dell has begun selling AMD X2 chips in their desktop line of machines.

AMD launched its Energy Efficient lineup in May 2006. The major difference is the lesser power consumption, with the least being 35W for the X2 3800+ and the maximum being 65W for the X2 4800+ and the X2 4400+. AMD claims this line has a greater megahertz-to-watt ratio than Intel's Core 2 Duo.


[edit] Ext. AMD64 / K8L
AMD K8L is a major revision of the AMD64 microarchitecture and hardware platform, and is due mid 2007. This is AMD's answer to the Intel Core 2 Duo line of processors.

See Main Article: AMD K8L for more information.


[edit] AMD Fusion
After the merger between AMD and ATI, the AMD Fusion was announced that merges a CPU and GPU on one chip. It is expected to be released late 2008 or early 2009.


[edit] Other productions
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[edit] Geode Processors
In August 2003 AMD also purchased the Geode business (originally the Cyrix MediaGX) from National Semiconductor to augment its existing line of embedded x86 processor products. During the second quarter of 2004, it launched new low-power Geode NX processors based on the K7 Thoroughbred architecture with speeds of 667 MHz and 1 GHz (fanless), and 1.4 GHz (TDP 25W).


[edit] Alchemy Processors
In February 2002, AMD acquired Alchemy Semiconductor and continued its line of processor in MIPS architecture processors, targets the handheld and Portable media player markets. In 13 June 2006, AMD officially announced that the Alchemy processor line will be transferred to Raza Microelectronics Inc.


[edit] Pacifica Technology
AMD's Athlon 64 series of processors are slated to include virtualization through the Pacifica technology specification (Officially named AMD-VTM). This technology stands in direct competition to Intel's 'Vanderpool' virtualization technology (now known as VT).


[edit] AMD Live!
See main article: AMD Live! for more information.


[edit] Torrenza
See main article: Torrenza for more information.


[edit] AMD Quad FX platform
See main article: AMD Quad FX platform for more information.


[edit] Production / Fabrication Plants
Only real men have fabs.
— former AMD CEO Jerry Sanders, III [7]

AMD produces their own processors in wholly owned semiconductor Fabrication Plants, called "FABs."

AMD uses a "FAB x" naming convention for their production facilities, where "x" is the number of years that have passed between the founding of AMD and the date the FAB opened.

At their Fabrication facilities, AMD utilizes a system called Automated Precision Manufacturing (APM in short). APM is a collection of manufacturing technologies AMD has developed over their history (many of which AMD holds patents for), which are designed to enhance the microprocessor production process, primarily in terms of yield. Much of APM is related to removing the "human equation" from the manufacturing process by isolating in-process wafers in containers that are only exposed to clean room facilities. AMD claims that the technologies that combine to make APM are unique to the industry and make it the foremost semiconductor manufacturer in the world - a fact which is lent some credence by their current agreement with Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing based in Singapore.

AMD currently has a production agreement with foundry Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing which allows Chartered access to AMD Automated Precision Manufacturing (APM) process technology, in exchange for which Chartered will act as "extra production capacity" for AMD.

AMD is in the planning stages of a major expansion in their production capacity. In addition to the completion of Fab 36 in Dresden (300 mm 90 nm process SOI), AMD is planning to upgrade Fab 30 (adjacent to Fab 36) in Dresden from 200 mm 90nm process SOI to a 300 mm 65 nm process SOI facility and rename it Fab 38, and open a new facility at the Luther Park Technology Campus in Stillwater, New York (likely 300 mm 32 nm process SOI production) between years 2009 to 2010.

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[edit] Current production

AMD Saxony in Dresden, Germany is the major wafer production siteAMD's main microprocessor manufacturing and design facilities are located in Dresden, Germany. Highly integrated microprocessors are manufactured in Taiwan made by third-party manufacturers under strict license from AMD. Between 2003 and 2005, they constructed a second manufacturing (300mm) plant nearby in order to increase the number of chips they can produce, thus becoming more competitive with Intel. The new plant has been named "Fab 36", in recognition of AMD's 36 years of operation, and is expected to reach full production in mid 2007.

In June 2006, Chartered Semiconductor begin with revenue shipments of AMD main microprocessor line [8]. Most of the manufactured microprocessors are shipped from Singapore to Taiwanese and Chinese OEM/ODM manufacturing companies that build computers for Lenovo and Dell.

As part of its expanding microprocessor design program, AMD started an engineering design center in Bangalore. The AMD India Engineering Centre Private Limited, which started in July, will contribute to the design of future generations of AMD microprocessors. The standalone facility will occupy approximately 38,000 square feet (3,500 m²) and is located in Richmond Road, Bangalore, Karnataka, India.


[edit] Partnerships
AMD continues to use industry partnerships as a means to counter Intel's superior financial resources. Notably NVIDIA's nForce2 chipset generated substantial revenues for NVIDIA as a popular enthusiast part.

HyperTransport is a point to point interconnect standard developed by AMD and Alpha Processor Incorporated, and then turned over to an industry standards body for finalization. It is used in the nForce2 (as northbridge-southbridge interconnect), nForce3, nForce4, and nForce 500 series chipsets, as well as in all other AMD processor compatible motherboards. While not intended as a revenue-generating product line for AMD, by providing technological leadership, AMD enhances its standing within the computer industry. Again, innovation is key to AMD's "Virtual Gorilla" corporate strategy.

AMD has also formed a strategic partnership with IBM, under which AMD gained silicon on insulator (SOI) manufacturing technology, and detailed advice on 90-nm implementation. IBM holds many patents on SOI technology, and Intel is reluctant to implement the process for this reason, despite the significant reductions in power consumption offered.

AMD is also loosely partnered with end-user companies such as HP, Compaq, ASUS, Alienware, Acer, Evesham Technology, Dell and several others in the area of processor distribution. Due to recent events regarding the lawsuit filed against Intel, AMD's marketshare in the end-user market has increased.

Unlike some other companies, AMD provided the technical details required for the open source BIOS project LinuxBIOS [9].


[edit] Flash technology
While less visible to the general public than its CPU business, AMD is also a global leader in flash memory. In 1993, to compete with Intel, AMD established a 50-50 partnership with Fujitsu called FASL, with manufacturing facilities in Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan. In 2003, the long-term partnership merged into a new company called FASL LLC, globally branded as Spansion[10] and headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, USA. AMD's Spansion stake increased to 60%, and Fujitsu held the remaining 40%. In December 2005, the joint venture went public, and Spansion now trades on NASDAQ under symbol SPSN. As part of the carveout, AMD's Spansion stake was reduced to 37%.

The new company sells flash memory products through AMD and Fujitsu and their respective sales forces. Notable product families include Mirrorbit flash. In periods the flash business has been extremely profitable, exceeding the financial performance of the CPU division, although the industry is somewhat prone to boom-bust cycles. AMD / Spansion claim a number of important milestones in Flash development [11].

1992: "Negative Gate Erase" technology introduced
1996: Industry's first 2.7-volt flash device
1997: Industry's first 1.8-volt flash device
1998: AMD and Fujitsu's first page-mode flash device
1999: AMD and Fujitsu's first burst-mode flash device
2001: MirrorBit™ technology introduced
2002: Advanced Sector Protection introduced
2003: Industry's first 512-megabit NOR flash memory unveiled
AMD no longer directly participates in the Flash memory devices market. AMD entered into a non-competition agreement, as of December 21, 2005, with Fujitsu and Spansion, pursuant to which it agreed not to directly or indirectly engage in a business that manufactures or supplies standalone semiconductor devices (including single chip, multiple chip or system devices) containing only Flash memory. [12]


[edit] Lawsuits against Intel Corporation
AMD has a long history of litigation with former partner and x86 creator Intel. In 2005, following an investigation, the Japan Federal Trade Commission found Intel guilty on a number of violations. On June 27, 2005, AMD won an antitrust suit against Intel in Japan, and on the same day, AMD filed a broad antitrust complaint against Intel in the U.S. Federal District Court in Delaware. The complaint alleges systematic use of secret rebates, special discounts, threats, and other means used by Intel to lock AMD processors out of the global market. In 2005 and 2006 AMD issued subpoenas against major computer manufacturers including Dell, Microsoft, IBM, HP, Sony, Toshiba.

A recent point of contention between AMD and Intel involves the popular Skype application. Skype version 2.0 added a 10-way conference call feature which could only be enabled on Intel dual-core processors; AMD dual-core processors cannot take advantage of the feature. Intel has acknowledged paying money to Skype to restrict this feature to Intel CPUs, a move which many consider to be an abuse of power. It was widely suspected that the 10-way conference call feature would work equally well on AMD dual-core processors, and that there was no technological justification for the restriction. These suspicions were validated in early March 2006, when noted hacker Maxxuss released a simple crack that enabled the feature on AMD CPUs by simply preventing Skype from detecting that the host computer uses an AMD processor. [13].


[edit] Merger with ATI
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At 8:00 AM EDT on Monday, July 24, 2006, AMD held a conference call to announce that a deal to merge with ATI Technologies, subject to approval by ATI's shareholders [14].

AMD is paying ATI $4.2 billion in cash along with 57 million shares of its stock, a total of $5.4 billion US dollars, to merge with ATI Technologies. The merged company will operate as AMD[15]. ATI will be known as the ATI business division of AMD.

On October 13, 2006, ATI shareholders approved the merger. News Source (Forbes).

On October 17, 2006, AMD announced the Ontario Superior Court of Justice had approved the merger, and the transaction was officially announced as completed on October 25, 2006. News source (News Wire Canada)

Following the announcement of the merger, AMD revealed development plans for the customer-centric platform codenamed "Fusion", which will merge GPU and CPU functions onto one die, thus significantly reducing costs for customers.

On December 1, 2006, AMD acknowledged that they received a subpoena from the Justice Department regarding possible antitrust violations. News source (New York Times)


[edit] See also
Jerry Sanders, III, Dirk Meyer, Héctor Ruiz
Athlon, Duron, Sempron
Athlon 64, Opteron
Turion 64
NexGen
Intel Corporation
NVIDIA
ATi Technologies
Am2900, Am29000, AMD K5, AMD K6, AMD K7, AMD K8, AMD K8L, AMD64, AMD Geode, AMD Alchemy, AMD Fusion
List of AMD microprocessors, List of AMD CPU slots and sockets
List of AMD Athlon microprocessors, List of AMD Athlon XP microprocessors
List of AMD Duron microprocessors, List of AMD Sempron microprocessors
List of AMD Athlon 64 microprocessors, List of AMD Opteron microprocessors
List of AMD Turion microprocessors
Comparison of AMD Processors
Comparison of Intel processors
Comparison of NVIDIA Graphics Processing Units
Comparison of ATI Graphics Processing Units

[edit] External links
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This section has been tagged since October 2006.Wikinews has news related to:
AMD files antitrust lawsuit against Intel in US federal district courtWikinews has news related to:
AMD joins forces with ATI



[edit] Official websites
AMD Corporate Website
50x15 initiative
AMD Live!
AMD ATi Division

[edit] Key information about AMD
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Company Profile - Yahoo! Finance
AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. - Google Finance
People at AMD (LinkedIn)
Industry Competitors and Institutional Investment Activity
AMD Set to be Top 10 Chip Supplier by Revenue

[edit] Production history
AMD: 30 Years of Pursuing the Leader
[16] - AMD CPU Chart
Cpu-collection.de - AMD processor images and descriptions
CPU-INFO: AMD K5, indepth processor history
AMD goes dual-core
Why AMD-MHz don't equal Intel-MHz
AMD's most recent conference call transcripts
A look at AMD's manufacturing process technologies
Showcases Quad-Core Opteron Processor

[edit] Future productions
Near term AMD interactive product outlook
AMD Transitions to More Efficient Technology

[edit] Other productions

[edit] Pacifica and virtualization
AMD Powerpoint documents on the specification
AMD Previews 'Pacifica' Virtualization Technology
AMD Preps 'Pacifica' Virtualization Technology

[edit] US antitrust case against Intel
Summary US antitrust complaint against Intel
Full text of US antitrust complaint against Intel

[edit] Merger with ATi
Official AMD ATi Merger Site on AMD website

[edit] Partnerships
Dell Confirmed to use AMD in PCs - International Business Times article



v • d • eList of AMD microprocessors • AMD • List of AMD CPU slots, sockets
Discontinued: Am2900 • Am29000 • Am9080 • Am286 • Am386 • Am486 • Am5x86 • K5 • K6 • K6-2 • K6-III • Duron • Athlon
Current Production: Sempron • Athlon 64 • Athlon 64 X2 • Turion 64 • Turion 64 X2 • Opteron
Upcoming: K8L • Fusion

v • d • eMajor computing companies[hide]
Hardware companies: Acer - Alcatel-Lucent - AMD - ASUS - Cisco - Dell - Freescale - Fujitsu Siemens - Infineon - Intel - Juniper - LG - Matsushita - Motorola - Philips - Samsung - Sony - STMicroelectronics - Texas Instruments - Toshiba -VIA
Software companies: CA - Oracle - SAP - Adobe
Hardware/software companies: Apple - EMC - Fujitsu - HP - Hitachi - IBM - Lenovo - Microsoft - NEC - Nokia - Sun - Siemens - Thomson
Dot-com Companies: Amazon.com - AOL - eBay - Google - Yahoo!
Technology Consulting companies: Accenture - Atos Origin -Infosys - Wipro - CSC - TCS - Satyam - EDS - Cognizant - Capgemini - LogicaCMG


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