AMD

AMD, or Advanced Micro Devices, was born on May 1, 1969, when Jerry Sanders and seven other engineers walked out of Fairchild Semiconductor and founded their own company in Sunnyvale, California. Sanders, then 33, had a simple plan: build logic chips and later memory chips. The Am9000, a clone of Intel's 8080 processor, arrived in 1975 and marked AMD's first step into the microprocessor world. For decades AMD played second fiddle to Intel, but it refused to fade away. The Athlon line in 1999 and the Opteron server chips in 2003 finally gave AMD real momentum, though the company stumbled badly in the early 2010s, nearly running out of cash.

Everything changed when Dr. Lisa Su took over as CEO in 2014. She bet the company on a new chip architecture called Zen, which launched in 2017. The Ryzen processors that followed were not just competitive; they often beat Intel's offerings on both performance and price. AMD's market share in desktop and server CPUs climbed steadily, and the company's revenue hit $25.79 billion in 2023. Today AMD employs roughly 28,000 people across offices in North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, with headquarters still in Santa Clara, California.

On the graphics side, AMD's Radeon division supplies GPUs for PCs and the custom chips inside both Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox consoles. The company also builds EPYC processors for data centers, adaptive SoCs for embedded systems, and FPGAs under the Alveo brand. Unlike Intel, AMD outsources chip manufacturing to foundries like TSMC, focusing its own engineers on design and architecture. Recent acquisitions of Xilinx and Pensando have pushed AMD deeper into networking and adaptive computing. The company remains the number two player in x86 processors and the primary challenger to both Intel and NVIDIA, driving competition that benefits every PC buyer and data center operator. [edit]