July 10, 2015 at 19:28AMD History, myths and legends
The year 1969 was remembered by different people. The first flight of the Boeing-747 took place. For the first time in the history of passenger aircraft, the Soviet Tu-144 overcame the sound barrier. The Proton-K launch vehicle launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, which brought the Moon-15 AMS to the flight path to the moon. ARPANET has appeared - the first prototype of the Internet. At the Proton plant in Kharkov, the first Soviet cassette recorder, Desna, was released.
And on May 1, 1969, Advanced Micro Devices, which we now know better by the acronym AMD, was founded in Chicago .
Company founder Walter Jeremy Sanders III was very different from most prominent figures in the IT industry. There is no doubt that, for example, Michael Dell and Bill Gates achieved everything with their own minds. But when this mind began to bear its first fruits, relatives were found who invested in them the first substantial amount.
Jerry Sanders grew up in a poor family. His father was famous for masterfully repairing traffic lights and drinking hard. So strong that they remember this even decades later. If not for his grandfather, Walter Jeremy Sanders First, the future founder of AMD, would hardly have graduated from high school and entered the University of Illinois. Grandfather was not a millionaire either, but at least he did not drink and did not spare time for his grandson. The younger Sanders respected his grandfather and studied properly. The company “Pulman”, known worldwide for its magnificent wagons, awarded him a scholarship.
But the main secret of Walter Jeremy Sanders III was that he was not going to work as an electronic engineer. You need to get a diploma, where would you be without it. But then it would be nice to go to California and become a film actor. Moreover, the appearance of the young man was suitable, and there were definitely abilities. But Chicago in the 50s of the last century was not the most peaceful city. According to FBI statistics, it still remains the most dangerous US metropolis, although the overall crime rate has declined. And then ... In general, one not the best evening of his life, Jerry Sanders stood up for a friend who had a conflict with the local criminal gang Chi Seven. A friend was able to carry his feet, but Jerry was not. The result was broken ribs and jaw, a broken nose and a mercilessly cut face with a knife. Girls, they say, love men with scars. But the camera is not very. Therefore, the career of a film actor had to be forgotten. Recovering from his wounds, Jeremy focused on his studies.
After graduation, he worked at Douglas Aircraft, once known as an aircraft manufacturer (now the remnants of the company are absorbed by the giant Boeing). Jerry Sanders was developing ... no, not electronic stuffing, but air conditioners. By the way, it’s also a rather fascinating occupation, but the trouble is that they paid very little for it. Therefore, only a year later, the future founder of AMD got a job in the Motorola sales department, where he worked for three years. And Sanders' next employer was Fairchild Semiconductor. It is unlikely that this name is familiar to you, although the company still exists. But it was her who was left in 1968 by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore to found the future Intel Corporation.
Then, in the late sixties, engineering personnel generally fled from Fairchild Semiconductor, because the company considered it right when people work not for money, but for interest. People, which is characteristic, did not think so. And now, after the next outcome, a group of engineers decided to create their own company. And even the name came up - Advanced Micro Devices. That's just, being creative people, they are poorly versed in business. And they didn’t really want to understand it. Therefore, the engineers had the idea to call the chief of that charming guy Sanders from the sales department. Jeremy did not refuse. And on May 1, 1969, AMD was registered with a start-up capital of $ 100,000.
We should not be surprised - where did a group of former engineers and a sales employee get a hundred thousand dollars, a gigantic amount for that time. Start-up capital, it is also authorized capital - there is no need to deposit the entire amount at once. It is enough to make a certain registration fee and sign an obligation to find a hundred thousand, if necessary. But there was absolutely no money for further work. Indeed, it required not even hundreds of thousands, but millions.
Sanders hired lawyer Tom Skornia, and with him he drew up a business plan for many years to come. Advanced Micro Devices was to develop and manufacture microelectronics - semiconductor microcircuits for computers and electronic devices. The direction seemed simply fantastically promising, and to start development it took one and a half million dollars. Today, such amounts give startups who promise to make a cat toilet with a webcam without any problems. But in 1969, AMD was skeptical of the plans, and no one gave investments for a long time.
And when almost everything seemed to be lost, Jeremy Sanders went to his former colleague, and now to potential competitor Robert Neuss. To the same, the founder of Intel. Robert carefully studied the business plan and ... signed the check. And he said goodbye that if suddenly it didn’t work out, Sanders would always be welcome at Intel.
Thus, it was Intel's investment that formed the basis of AMD's business. Over the next decades, the relations between the companies were very different in emotional coloring episodes. But this piece of history cannot be rewritten.
Until his death in 1990, Robert Noyce reasonably supported AMD. In particular, he contributed to the licensing of Intel's development, without which it would have been much more difficult to gain a place in the sun. Why did Neuss do this? Sentimentality? Desire to help a former colleague? Understanding the need for a strong, but essentially friendly competitor in the market? Who knows now. But, perhaps, if it were not for the sudden death of Neuss in June 90th, much in the relations of companies could have turned out differently.
However, we will not consider Robert Noyce a kind kind uncle. The processors with x86 architecture were used in military development, and the US Department of Defense was not happy with the prospect of staying with one single chip supplier. As the latter became less and less (remember which zoo was observed in the early nineties), the importance of AMD, as an alternative manufacturer, grew. According to a 1982 agreement, AMD had all the licenses for the production of 8086, 80186 and 80286 processors, however, the freshly developed 80386 Intel processor categorically refused to transfer AMD. And the agreement tore. This was followed by a long and high-profile lawsuit - the first in the history of companies. It ended only in 1991 with the victory of AMD. Intel paid a billion dollars to the plaintiff for its position.
But still the relationship was spoiled, and there was no question of past trust. Moreover, AMD has taken the path of reverse engineering. The company continued to produce Am386, and then Am486, processors differing in hardware, but completely identical in microcode. Then Intel went to court. Again, the process dragged on for a long time, and success was either on one side or the other. But on December 30, 1994, a court decision was made, according to which the Intel microcode is still the property of Intel, and somehow it is not good for other companies to use it if the owner does not like it. Therefore, since 1995, everything has changed seriously. On the Intel Pentium and AMD K5 processors, any applications for the x86 platform were launched, but from the point of view of architecture they were fundamentally different. And it turns out
However, to ensure compatibility, cross-pollination with technology has not gone anywhere. In modern Intel processors, AMD has many patents, and vice versa, AMD neatly adds instruction sets developed by Intel.
It’s no secret that AMD’s market share in processors has always been slightly less than Intel’s. And the development budget was also slightly inferior to Big Brother. In most cases, this means that the company acts as a catch-up, and lures consumers according to the formula “look, here we also have about the same thing, only much cheaper”.
But the history of AMD - especially after 1995 - shows that even relatively small budgets can be used extremely efficiently.
In 2000, AMD was the first in the world to release a processor with a frequency of 1 GHz. This was a representative of the growing Athlon family.
In 2003, AMD was the first to launch x86-based processors supporting 64-bit instruction sets. They appeared immediately in the server family Opteron and user Athlon. These kits later appeared on Intel and VIA products. And until now, some operating systems call them AMD64, although competitors prefer their own brands in marketing documents.
Without slowing down, in 2004, AMD released the world's first dual-core x86-processor Athlon X2. At that time, very few applications were able to use two cores at the same time, but in specialized software the performance increase was very impressive.
In 2006, AMD introduced the world's first 4-core server processor, where all 4 cores are grown on a single chip, and not “glued” of the two, like business colleagues. The most complicated engineering problems have been solved - both at the development stage and in production.
In the same 2006, AMD bought ATI, one of the leading manufacturers of graphics chips. From that moment, traditional computing and graphics became inextricably linked in AMD's business. As a result, this led to the creation of hybrid processors. They will appear in 2011, and for the first time show that integrated graphics can cope with most tasks no worse than discrete.
Graphics AMD recently settled in all the main consoles - Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Wii U. Together with processors, by the way. And where Intel is responsible for computing - for example, in the mighty Apple Mac Pro - AMD provides the picture. And it helps the processor in some tasks.
The list of AMD technological breakthroughs is very impressive, and every year their list is getting longer. Another issue, innovations per se do not always begin to sell themselves. Ahead usually is a long way from technology in silicon to its implementation in software. And when the invention reaches us, it manages to become an industrial standard and appear in other manufacturers. But does this detract from the achievements of AMD engineers? I don’t think so.
The market for traditional PCs (and laptops, unfortunately, too) can hardly be called promising and growing. Burying the good old computers is still very reckless, but it is obvious that the future of personal computing in some other devices.
We have already mentioned modern consoles, which use special versions of AMD hybrid processors. Considering that consoles are developed with a large margin so that after five years they will look modern, it is not difficult to evaluate the margin of performance.
At the Computex exhibition, held in early June in Taiwan ( report on Geektimes), AMD solutions crept into the NAS, where the manufacturers of processors with ARM architecture dominated, and Intel in the top segment. Qnap's new NAS line now runs on AMD. But Qnap is one of the trendsetters in this class of devices, which, as the number of content consumers grows, can soon become an integral element of the household. Equipped with a TV, fridge and microwave.
AMD openly delayed the development of solutions for ultra-mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. SoC for the latter has been in the assortment for quite some time, but they are not often found in finished products. In AMD smartphones, so far it has not been possible to meet. And while Intel, using the power of its engineering and marketing departments, is promoting processors with x86 architecture in smartphones, AMD is preparing an asymmetric answer. HSA Foundation formed with ARM, MediaTek, Qualcomm, Samsung, and Texas Instruments. HSA stands for Heterogeneous System Architecture, i.e. heterogeneous system architecture. The participants set a rather ambitious goal - to unify programming rules and develop common standards for parallel computing. When all tasks are assigned to the most suitable SoC modules, and even allowing the latter to help where this help is significant. Decomposing the calculations evenly over traditional cores, effectively loading graphic ones, and reassigning sound to special DSPs (they are available on some AMD processors) - all this, as far as is obvious from the point of view of necessity, is so technically difficult. But if such a problem is solved within the industry, the result can significantly change the user experience at various levels.
Since 2012, AMD has been developing SoCs with ARM architecture, and by 2020 they should occupy a significant share in the company’s business.
For forty-six years, Advanced Micro Devices has changed dramatically more than once. But the essence remains the same: by small forces strive to do the impossible.
And regularly make sure that the impossible, in general, does not exist.
Company founder Walter Jeremy Sanders III was very different from most prominent figures in the IT industry. There is no doubt that, for example, Michael Dell and Bill Gates achieved everything with their own minds. But when this mind began to bear its first fruits, relatives were found who invested in them the first substantial amount.Jerry Sanders grew up in a poor family. His father was famous for masterfully repairing traffic lights and drinking hard. So strong that they remember this even decades later. If not for his grandfather, Walter Jeremy Sanders First, the future founder of AMD, would hardly have graduated from high school and entered the University of Illinois. Grandfather was not a millionaire either, but at least he did not drink and did not spare time for his grandson. The younger Sanders respected his grandfather and studied properly. The company “Pulman”, known worldwide for its magnificent wagons, awarded him a scholarship.
But the main secret of Walter Jeremy Sanders III was that he was not going to work as an electronic engineer. You need to get a diploma, where would you be without it. But then it would be nice to go to California and become a film actor. Moreover, the appearance of the young man was suitable, and there were definitely abilities. But Chicago in the 50s of the last century was not the most peaceful city. According to FBI statistics, it still remains the most dangerous US metropolis, although the overall crime rate has declined. And then ... In general, one not the best evening of his life, Jerry Sanders stood up for a friend who had a conflict with the local criminal gang Chi Seven. A friend was able to carry his feet, but Jerry was not. The result was broken ribs and jaw, a broken nose and a mercilessly cut face with a knife. Girls, they say, love men with scars. But the camera is not very. Therefore, the career of a film actor had to be forgotten. Recovering from his wounds, Jeremy focused on his studies.
After graduation, he worked at Douglas Aircraft, once known as an aircraft manufacturer (now the remnants of the company are absorbed by the giant Boeing). Jerry Sanders was developing ... no, not electronic stuffing, but air conditioners. By the way, it’s also a rather fascinating occupation, but the trouble is that they paid very little for it. Therefore, only a year later, the future founder of AMD got a job in the Motorola sales department, where he worked for three years. And Sanders' next employer was Fairchild Semiconductor. It is unlikely that this name is familiar to you, although the company still exists. But it was her who was left in 1968 by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore to found the future Intel Corporation.
Then, in the late sixties, engineering personnel generally fled from Fairchild Semiconductor, because the company considered it right when people work not for money, but for interest. People, which is characteristic, did not think so. And now, after the next outcome, a group of engineers decided to create their own company. And even the name came up - Advanced Micro Devices. That's just, being creative people, they are poorly versed in business. And they didn’t really want to understand it. Therefore, the engineers had the idea to call the chief of that charming guy Sanders from the sales department. Jeremy did not refuse. And on May 1, 1969, AMD was registered with a start-up capital of $ 100,000.
Friend or foe?
We should not be surprised - where did a group of former engineers and a sales employee get a hundred thousand dollars, a gigantic amount for that time. Start-up capital, it is also authorized capital - there is no need to deposit the entire amount at once. It is enough to make a certain registration fee and sign an obligation to find a hundred thousand, if necessary. But there was absolutely no money for further work. Indeed, it required not even hundreds of thousands, but millions.
Sanders hired lawyer Tom Skornia, and with him he drew up a business plan for many years to come. Advanced Micro Devices was to develop and manufacture microelectronics - semiconductor microcircuits for computers and electronic devices. The direction seemed simply fantastically promising, and to start development it took one and a half million dollars. Today, such amounts give startups who promise to make a cat toilet with a webcam without any problems. But in 1969, AMD was skeptical of the plans, and no one gave investments for a long time.
And when almost everything seemed to be lost, Jeremy Sanders went to his former colleague, and now to potential competitor Robert Neuss. To the same, the founder of Intel. Robert carefully studied the business plan and ... signed the check. And he said goodbye that if suddenly it didn’t work out, Sanders would always be welcome at Intel.
Thus, it was Intel's investment that formed the basis of AMD's business. Over the next decades, the relations between the companies were very different in emotional coloring episodes. But this piece of history cannot be rewritten.
Until his death in 1990, Robert Noyce reasonably supported AMD. In particular, he contributed to the licensing of Intel's development, without which it would have been much more difficult to gain a place in the sun. Why did Neuss do this? Sentimentality? Desire to help a former colleague? Understanding the need for a strong, but essentially friendly competitor in the market? Who knows now. But, perhaps, if it were not for the sudden death of Neuss in June 90th, much in the relations of companies could have turned out differently.
However, we will not consider Robert Noyce a kind kind uncle. The processors with x86 architecture were used in military development, and the US Department of Defense was not happy with the prospect of staying with one single chip supplier. As the latter became less and less (remember which zoo was observed in the early nineties), the importance of AMD, as an alternative manufacturer, grew. According to a 1982 agreement, AMD had all the licenses for the production of 8086, 80186 and 80286 processors, however, the freshly developed 80386 Intel processor categorically refused to transfer AMD. And the agreement tore. This was followed by a long and high-profile lawsuit - the first in the history of companies. It ended only in 1991 with the victory of AMD. Intel paid a billion dollars to the plaintiff for its position.
But still the relationship was spoiled, and there was no question of past trust. Moreover, AMD has taken the path of reverse engineering. The company continued to produce Am386, and then Am486, processors differing in hardware, but completely identical in microcode. Then Intel went to court. Again, the process dragged on for a long time, and success was either on one side or the other. But on December 30, 1994, a court decision was made, according to which the Intel microcode is still the property of Intel, and somehow it is not good for other companies to use it if the owner does not like it. Therefore, since 1995, everything has changed seriously. On the Intel Pentium and AMD K5 processors, any applications for the x86 platform were launched, but from the point of view of architecture they were fundamentally different. And it turns out
However, to ensure compatibility, cross-pollination with technology has not gone anywhere. In modern Intel processors, AMD has many patents, and vice versa, AMD neatly adds instruction sets developed by Intel.
Get ahead of time
It’s no secret that AMD’s market share in processors has always been slightly less than Intel’s. And the development budget was also slightly inferior to Big Brother. In most cases, this means that the company acts as a catch-up, and lures consumers according to the formula “look, here we also have about the same thing, only much cheaper”.
But the history of AMD - especially after 1995 - shows that even relatively small budgets can be used extremely efficiently.
In 2000, AMD was the first in the world to release a processor with a frequency of 1 GHz. This was a representative of the growing Athlon family.
In 2003, AMD was the first to launch x86-based processors supporting 64-bit instruction sets. They appeared immediately in the server family Opteron and user Athlon. These kits later appeared on Intel and VIA products. And until now, some operating systems call them AMD64, although competitors prefer their own brands in marketing documents.
Without slowing down, in 2004, AMD released the world's first dual-core x86-processor Athlon X2. At that time, very few applications were able to use two cores at the same time, but in specialized software the performance increase was very impressive.In 2006, AMD introduced the world's first 4-core server processor, where all 4 cores are grown on a single chip, and not “glued” of the two, like business colleagues. The most complicated engineering problems have been solved - both at the development stage and in production.
In the same 2006, AMD bought ATI, one of the leading manufacturers of graphics chips. From that moment, traditional computing and graphics became inextricably linked in AMD's business. As a result, this led to the creation of hybrid processors. They will appear in 2011, and for the first time show that integrated graphics can cope with most tasks no worse than discrete.
Graphics AMD recently settled in all the main consoles - Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Wii U. Together with processors, by the way. And where Intel is responsible for computing - for example, in the mighty Apple Mac Pro - AMD provides the picture. And it helps the processor in some tasks.
The list of AMD technological breakthroughs is very impressive, and every year their list is getting longer. Another issue, innovations per se do not always begin to sell themselves. Ahead usually is a long way from technology in silicon to its implementation in software. And when the invention reaches us, it manages to become an industrial standard and appear in other manufacturers. But does this detract from the achievements of AMD engineers? I don’t think so.
Not just a PC. And for a long time
The market for traditional PCs (and laptops, unfortunately, too) can hardly be called promising and growing. Burying the good old computers is still very reckless, but it is obvious that the future of personal computing in some other devices.
We have already mentioned modern consoles, which use special versions of AMD hybrid processors. Considering that consoles are developed with a large margin so that after five years they will look modern, it is not difficult to evaluate the margin of performance.
At the Computex exhibition, held in early June in Taiwan ( report on Geektimes), AMD solutions crept into the NAS, where the manufacturers of processors with ARM architecture dominated, and Intel in the top segment. Qnap's new NAS line now runs on AMD. But Qnap is one of the trendsetters in this class of devices, which, as the number of content consumers grows, can soon become an integral element of the household. Equipped with a TV, fridge and microwave.
AMD openly delayed the development of solutions for ultra-mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. SoC for the latter has been in the assortment for quite some time, but they are not often found in finished products. In AMD smartphones, so far it has not been possible to meet. And while Intel, using the power of its engineering and marketing departments, is promoting processors with x86 architecture in smartphones, AMD is preparing an asymmetric answer. HSA Foundation formed with ARM, MediaTek, Qualcomm, Samsung, and Texas Instruments. HSA stands for Heterogeneous System Architecture, i.e. heterogeneous system architecture. The participants set a rather ambitious goal - to unify programming rules and develop common standards for parallel computing. When all tasks are assigned to the most suitable SoC modules, and even allowing the latter to help where this help is significant. Decomposing the calculations evenly over traditional cores, effectively loading graphic ones, and reassigning sound to special DSPs (they are available on some AMD processors) - all this, as far as is obvious from the point of view of necessity, is so technically difficult. But if such a problem is solved within the industry, the result can significantly change the user experience at various levels.
Since 2012, AMD has been developing SoCs with ARM architecture, and by 2020 they should occupy a significant share in the company’s business.
For forty-six years, Advanced Micro Devices has changed dramatically more than once. But the essence remains the same: by small forces strive to do the impossible.
And regularly make sure that the impossible, in general, does not exist.