AMD
More info
- Founded
- Founders
- Jerry Sanders and others
- Headquarters
- Santa Clara, California
- Type
- Semiconductor company
- Website
- amd.com
Intel's stubborn competitor for fifty years — at times near bankruptcy, at times the one setting the pace.
It began as a second-source supplier of Intel-compatible chips, a role IBM demanded so as not to depend on a single manufacturer. The breakthrough came with the Athlon in 1999, which beat Intel to 1 GHz, and with AMD64 — it was AMD's 64-bit extension of x86 that became the standard, not Intel's competing Itanium.
The years after buying the graphics company ATI in 2006 were financially bleak. The turnaround came with the Zen architecture in 2017, which made Ryzen and Epyc competitive again. The company has manufactured nothing itself since spinning off GlobalFoundries in 2009 — it all goes to TSMC.