AMD: The Rise, Fall and Future of an Industry Giant

The idea was to publish an article that is accessible to a large readership. Capturing every nuance in forty-three years of history of a semiconductor company isn't particularly practical....and of course, the article was never intended as an official biography of AMD, nor a substitute for the knowledge base that is the web.

I sure hope they don't pull out of the desktop CPU market, I always preferred their price to performance ratio, although I must admit I had to go with Intel at some points. The last AMD machine I built was an Athlon 64 X2 and I'd really like to build a Piledriver system and overclock the hell out of it soon.

This was a great article DBZ thank you.

Takes me back down memory lane.

My first home pc was a 286. the first system I build was using an AMD 386 processor.

Miss those early days of Socket A and the thunderbird cpu's the durons were great cheap overclockers also.

Sadly my last amd system is Socket 939 Opteron 170, which I still have doing HTPC duty. I jumped ship and Nehalem and never looked back.

I do miss those years in the early 2000 with the back and forth between intel and amd and its sad to seem them in their current state. And if we do lose AMD I really hope someone will pickup Ati and keep the radeons alive.

And I think someone mentioned it but Slot A athlons were out before Socket A.

Cyrix CPU gone and the rest of them now AMD with ATI next Quad-core gen CPU with turbo I have that now with 32GB or DDR3 RAM (ram was cheap with the heatsinks and XPReady features) but in all CPU is quick for what I need it for. I hope they don't go under Out of the 3x new system I have purchased in 2012 only one is Intel the other two are AMD base. If Intel is the only maker of the chips then we're in trouble with pricing on desktop, laptops and tablets.

Great articel, and a wonderful trip down the memorylane, have built round 100 amd pcs up til core2 came, after that I stopped building for others, couse when I coudnt build the best with amd in a given budget (beside real cheap pc, witch are boring to build) with AMD I told them to go somewhere else to get their pcs build.

Couse it was not just that they paid OEMs to not build AMD comps, if my memory serves me well, Intel also cheated with its compiler, not letting AMD take advantage of instuctions sets that AMD cpus supported.

But aslong as a PC build had a budget that was not just the best of the best, u could almost always build an AMD gamer rig that was faster than an Intel gamer rig for the same price (a lil cheaper cpu and motherboard gives room for a lil better gpu, and as long as the cpu dosnt bottelneck the pc with the fastest gpu, is the best gamer rig)

Well thanks for the articel, great reading

greatings from Norweagian Oldtimer nerd.

I see this argument posted alot and I disagree and where is why.

Intel has to continue selling cpu's to keep their insanely high profit margits something like 60% last I checked. They also have shareholders to answer to. So while I do see prices going up abit without competiton they cannot price themselves out of the market. If there products becomes too expensive and sales drop. They can no longer keep those margins and it will cause them more trouble than its worth and lost profit.

What about the lawsuit AMD had against Inel. As far as I know that was the killing stroke. Intel payed off all the major distributors so that they wouldn't sell AMD computer from 2000 to 2005 when AMD had the it's fastest processors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_v._Intel

I think if you read the article you'll find in paragraphs 10 and 11 of page three - with a provided link to an earlier TS news article, touch on the litigation. If you're after a more comprehensive breakdown. The judgement is available on the SEC archive site, the backround is available in many formats, and the ancillary information- such as what constitutes a loyalty discount ( a key factor in Intel's defence case) and any other point of interest can be found relatively easily via search engine... and as noted, Intel's judgement would have been a helluva lot more severe had it not been for the fact that AMD could not supply the customers it already had

AMD's woes were certainly compounded by Intel's behaviour in this timeframe- and led directly to AMD spinning off their foundry's amongst other things, but the decline of the company didn't hinge on that one facet. Rather than rehash the whole article, I'd suggest reading the relevant portions.


.

thanks divide. Personally I think Intels payoffs have been the biggest factor in hurting AMD. The company hasn't had enough breathing room to make a mistake here and there, even Intel makes em. AMD should have gotten 9 or 10 billion from the settlement.

Unfortunately for AMD, they got decked by a combination rather than a single punch. AMD's fabrication capacity lagged majorly during a time when they offered a reasonable alternative to Intel's P5/P6/NetBurst CPU's- a lack of capacity and production generally scares away larger contracts, which compounded when AMD was late to market with the K8. The ATI deal effectively hung a debt millstone around AMD's neck that they still carry, and of course Intel's hardball litigation (which also included NEC and basically destroying Cyrix), "optimized" compilers, and cash incentives to OEM's. I really don't think you can pin AMD's fall on one cause- if you're going to war against Intel, I don't think it helps if your commander-in-chief is Hector Ruiz.

They do, but between an efficient management, and a ruthless business methodology, they tend to minimize the fallout. Keeping your competitors tied up in court translates into increased market share. Facing antitrust suits down the line might result in fines/sanctions, but those are likely to more than offset by the years of previous profit. The FTC might take some cash from you, but they certainly won't repossess your increased presence in the market that the unfair practice netted the company.

Maybe. But, AMD needed to service debt accrued from the ATI buyout., and antitrust cases don't seem to be the money earners that some believe them to be - Cyrix and Chips & Technologies basically got zilch, and Intel got less than a wrist slap in Japan and South Korea- even the EU's 1.06bn euro fine wouldn't make a dent in Intel's yearly profit line.

You're quite the elaborate troll pleading that it's mere bias towards Intel or some other accusations. AMD integrated graphics are not meant for professional graphics and neither are Intel's in their current state. The raw CPU power matters more in most benchmarks and that's where Intel destroys AMD. This has been said a billion times.

Graham: I believe that this article is factually incorrect at several points, the netburst architecture was used solely in the Pentium 4 and was defined by the double pumped ALU's present in that design.

It therefore looks a little silly when you say "When the K6 hit shelves in 1997, it represented a viable alternative to the Pentium MMX, and while Intel continued to stumble along with its underwhelming Netburst architecture" that isnt a true statement. It needs to say that was a viable alternative to the Pentium Pro architecture.

+1 to Per's comment about FPU performance.

Also I remember PIII Coppermine held a slight performance advantage over the competing Athlons, however, once, AMD improved Athlon with on-die L2 along with die shrink they got the performance advantage. Also, once Intel launched P4/Northwood (2.4+), it generally outperformed Athlon XP.

@DBZ
In general, a nice read, keep it up and thanks.

AMD has serious problems in producing new products and cash flow, something that Intel and Nvidia don't. Nvidia graphics revenue alone equaled ALL of AMD and they had 200 million in profit as well. Bleeding thousands of employees in the tech world is not a good sign.

Article is a pretty generic copy and paste, but (other then some minor misleading/mis-information) is well portrayed and re-written for the basic reader. One thing I will never forget is the feeling I got when AMD aquired ATI, you just felt like AMD was going all in on something they didn't need to. You don't get anywhere in life without taking risks and this was no different so I didn't fault thier choice; but they have never recovered and its too bad because AMD's competition and involvement in this industry has been instrumental in the development of various chipset architecture and instruction sets as we know it.

I'm aware that the architecture in use at the start of the time period was P5, moved though P6, to Netburst. I hadn't intended to imply that 1997 signified the introduction of that arch, only to note that the during the era that AMD designed it's first in-house CPU's through to the K8 (I.e. 1997-2006-up until Conroe's launch) -what I termed "the golden age"- that Netburst was introduced and didn't evolve that much as a design philosophy ( process shrinks and speed increases aside).
BTW: Pentium D also used the Netburst architecture, and while technically they are P4 in an MCM package, they are a naming convention just as much as Pentium 4, and the Pentium Pro (P6 arch) you mentioned.

@ Per
Since AMD were licencing Intel's designs, I thought it would be implied that Intel would be first to market with any new design- so in effect, AMD would be competing largely against newer models from Intel at every turn -especially during the nearly five years of inactivity caused by the i386 lawsuit, where eventual Am386 CPU's would be in the marketplace alongside Intel's 486. The article was aimed at AMD in general- not the enthusiast in isolation, which is why I eschewed dissecting a poor FPU performance and adequate ALU performance (and the required explanations/clarifications as well as an inclusion of Intel's product line, and timeline for context)...which would generally also lead to benchmarks, which would in turn lead to Intel's compilers etc. etc.
I'm not entirely sure how you could condense a 43 year history and some future speculation into the word count constraints required for a generally accessible article- as it was I had omit some fairly significant content ( chipsets, brand expansion/the Siemens AG joint venture, Spansion -the AMD/Fujitsu joint venture, manufacturing expansion, the x86-64 extension and its licencing to Intel and VIA etc, 10h family, most of the bit-slice processor history and implementation- including the Am95C60- the AMD graphics chip from 1987, graphics post-ATI acquisition, Globalfoundries spin-off and a lot more)

Maybe the next article can revolve around a timeline-performance (integer and float)-price-marketing-availability interactive graph - maybe our budding Hemingway, amstech would like to tackle it.

"Maybe the next article can revolve around a timeline-performance (integer and float)-price-marketing-availability interactive graph - maybe our budding Hemingway, amstech would like to tackle it."

I appreciate the sentiment but I could never compare to someone with a Mustache that great.

He would just do a "generic copy and paste" like the rest of us

I took the same route when building my new system the Intel i7 architecture has such a high price premium attached.

From what I remember this might be taken out of context. My own experience I recall that Dell stopped selling AMD computers, Even Computer Shopper stopped listing AMD machines for sale in their publications. It wasn't until AMD filed suit against Intel did Dell start selling AMD machines again. So of course they wouldn't have enough, because the balance of supply and demand suddenly got off balanced.So I have a hard time considering that as AMD bad managment, it's a result of Intel underhanded business practice suppressing supply demand for 5 years prior. After the law suit was filled all the major suppliers started selling the machines again. Shortly after that the Core2 duo's where released. Intel effectively cheated AMD of what should have been a highly profitable 5 years. Of all the factors it was Intel that underhandedness that kept AMD from becoming a household name which to me is a killing stroke.