AMD - A journey to the world's best gaming processor manufacturer

Advanced Micro Devices - An Overview

8 workers of Fairchild Semiconductors joined their hands together on 1st May 1969, to create an independent semiconductor company and named it Advanced Micro Devices or shortly AMD. As we know today AMD is one of the largest semiconductor manufacturer and is delivering higher performance and competing head-to-head against Intel. The company has seen its rise, its fall, and its revival in a short term of years. It also faced huge loses and seen an all time low of less than $2 of its share prices which currently is above $80 a share. So let's examine how this company became one of the Behemoths in the semiconductor industries.

The beginning 

Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore left Fairchild Semiconductor and founded their own company on 18 July, 1968 and named it Integrated Electronics, widely known as Intel. Less than an year later AMD was founded. Jerry Sanders was its president who was Fairchild's former director of marketing. 

Back then AMD didn't had its own resources to fund for research and development and so it created computer processors for other companies. They redesigned parts from National Semiconductors and Fairchild and didn't compete directly with Intel and IBM who were spending resources on research and development of Integrated Circuits (IC). 

AMD 8080

In 1980s, AMD signed a contract with Intel and IBM. As Intel wasn't able to fulfill the supplies of processors to IBM so it started outsourcing its processors, i.e., AMD started selling licensed clones of Intel's Processors to IBM which were 8080, 8086 and 80L286. AMD also intelligently started making these processors a bit more faster as compared to Intel's. Therefore, AMD earned good revenues at this time.

By 1985, AMD bought Am386 which was also a clone of Intel's 80L386 but Intel didn't approved AMD's efforts of copying its processors. But, after a lot of controversies AMD's production was declared legal by courts and authorities and therefore they kept on doing it until 1994, when they made Am486, a clone of Intel's 80L486 with higher frequency and stopped copying Intel.

AMD's own Research and Development

AMD K5

After 1994 AMD's contract with Intel and IBM officially ended and AMD started working on its own micro architectures. AMD launched K5 processor in 1996 which was based on AMD AM29K x86 micro architecture. For the first time L1 cache was introduced in a processor and AMD bought this to K5 with 16 KB of i-cache and 8 KB of d-cache. The K5 wasn't able to perform well as compared to Intel's counterpart, Pentium processors. 

    

AMD made K6 which was a  bit more powerful than K5 and the K6 was somewhat similar to Intel's Pentium 2. With K6 II, AMD introduced L2 cache and these were able to make more revenue than its predecessors. K6 III (Sharptooth) was launched shortly after K6 II in February, 1999 and this processor offered L3 cache too. The whole K6 series was based on 180nm. 

A Shining Moment

AMD Athlon

The legendary Athlon lineup of processors was released shortly after K6 and it was one of a kind processor during 1999. Athlon was also based on K6 micro architecture and it provided frequencies upto 1 GHz which was a steep advancement over 550 MHz in K6. Athlon quickly became famous in the CPU market. AMD's net revenue increased from $2.5 billion in 1998 to $4.6 billion by 2000.

   

By 2003, AMD launched the next lineup in its Athlon series, the Athlon 64 which was the first 64-bit processor launched in consumer level. In the next 2 years AMD launched world's first dual-core CPU, the Athlon 64 X2. And then gradually reduced the fabrication technology in the Athlon successors to 65nm, which was appreciable as of that time.

AMD Athlon 64 X2

AMD also bought Sempron processors to market and developed them consistently from 2004 to 2014. The Sempron lineup competed against Intel's Celeron processors. 

AMD's downgrade

AMD Phenom

Phenom series was launched by 2008 and it introduced Quad-core CPU to the market. Though Phenom was an 4 core processor it didn't proved well for AMD.

AMD's Fusion family of processors bought APU to the market. An APU is an Accelerated Processing Unit which is a combination of CPU and GPU. These iGPUs were not so powerful as compared to dedicated graphics but they offered reliable frame rates in lowest settings. 

AMD FX

After the fusion family AMD developed Bobcat architecture and Bulldozer architecture which introduced FX series with 4, 6 and 8 cores. These processors were also not able to generate revenues for AMD as they were late and customers were more focused on Intel CPUs.

By that time AMD was spending huge amounts of money on funding new manufacturing plants and buying companies. AMD bought ATI Technologies (currently known as Radeon Technologies group), a GPU company which triggered an internal chaos into AMD.   

By 2014, AMD was drowning in billions and seemed to destroy completely. The company was under huge debts and slowly they were vanishing from the market. AMD's share price dropped to an all time low of less than $2 a share. The company seemed to be collapsing.

A New Dawn

Dr. Lisa Su

AMD's former CEO Rory Reed gave up his position to Dr. Lisa Su, one of the most successful CEO currently in a male-dominated semiconductor industry. Dr. Lisa Su was a MIT student and completed her BS, Masters and Doctorate at MIT. She was in the semiconductor industry since 20 years at Texas Instruments, IBM and Freescale semiconductors, before joining AMD. Lisa Su examined AMD's problems and mistakes and took the challenge to bring back AMD. She adopted a very clear step for the company's revival : Developing technologies which was AMD's niche; Focusing development specifically for the gaming sector with better CPUs and GPUs, cloud systems and enterprise systems; and reducing all debts. 

Jim Keller

Lisa Su laid out plans for development of Zen based CPUs and appointed Jim Keller for leading the respective team for their new Zen architecture. AMD planned to make Zen an affordable yet powerful CPU with easy scalability. 

From 2015 to 2017 AMD said that it will be getting off from the CPU market for quite some time and will again come back with the Zen architecture and if they would not return with Zen or any other better solution then by 2020 AMD would probably become bankrupt.

During this time Intel made its Skylake and Sandy bridge architecture CPUs. Intel decided by then to release new generation processors with a bit improvement in frequency. Intel was making huge profits in 2015 and was rated top in the CPU market. Because of the only player in the processor industry Intel was doing anything as it liked, developing processors which were over priced and less performing. 

With the announcement of Ryzen and Radeon in 2017 AMD started bouncing back, but the 1st Generation Ryzen CPUs didn't got much attention because of its heating issues and instability with certain applications. But they were better than Intel in terms of affordability, higher core counts and support for ECC RAM. 

By 2018, AMD launched an improved Ryzen lineup with the introduction of 2nd Generation of processors, based on Zen+ architecture. The 2nd Gen promised to deliver better performances and lower instability and heating issues. Quickly by the 4th Quarter of 2018, AMD started outselling Intel. They acquired 23% of the CPU market in 2018 as compared to only 18% in 2016, which was previously acquired mostly by Intel. 

Users were slowly gaining hope on AMD and the company was slowly reviving from its 6 years slum. Intel was also not able to come out with a 10nm processors which they promised back in 2017, so the market was slowly inclining towards AMD. By late 2019 AMD acquired 32% of the market share which was 1/3rd of the market. 

AMD's processors consistently out performed Intel's CPUs with the release of the 4000 series of Ryzen processors based on Zen 2 architecture. AMD was making appreciable improvement on multi threaded performance but they were not capable to outperform their rival's single core performance which was a drawback for the company.

However, with Zen 3 architecture used in Ryzen 5000 series announced in 2020, AMD for the first was able to outperform Intel in single core performance and in every aspect. Also AMD's 7nm fabrication technology proved more efficient than Intel's traditional 14nm fabrication technology.

AMD's efforts also continues to compete with Nvidia in the GPU industry. Though they have not outperformed them but they will probably beat Nvidia in the future.

2021 and Beyond

AMD not only competed with Intel but also played against Nvidia. Along with powerful CPUs AMD's RDNA GPU architecture is promising better performances as compared to Nvidia's Graphics abilities. AMD has also started gaining its market on gaming consoles. AMD's processors are used in supercomputers and servers such as Titan or OLCF-3 which is a supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, ranked 1 at the top500 supercomputers of the world until June 2019.

Titan Supercomputer

AMD is looking forward and developing 5nm desktop and laptop processors on Zen 4 architecture. The company will also introduce RDNA2 GPU in its upcoming Radeon GPUs. 

AMD RDNA 2

The company has returned from a very decisive position. Lisa Su played a pivotal role in AMD's revival. AMD has done significant improvements and delivered what the customers deserved. A cheaper, powerful and promising performer against Integrated Electronics or Intel.