The world's second largest manufacturer of x86 processors is certainly no newcomer to the industry, being younger than the number one chip maker by only a single year. As of tomorrow, AMD will be officially celebrating their 40th birthday since the company was founded. Initially setting up shop in Sunnyvale, California, AMD began as a manufacturer of RAM. This was very similar to their primary competitor today, Intel.
Much like Intel as well, they moved into the development of microprocessors within a few years, with one of their first big projects being the reverse-engineering of Intel's 8080. They've come a long way since then, and have consistently been the only company combating Intel on equal ground. Their success shows; open the hood of just about any desktop computer in the world, and it's most likely going to be either Intel or AMD powering it.
To celebrate turning 40, AMD is holding a series of product giveaways over the next few months, giving anyone the chance to win CPUs, GPUs and even gaming consoles. All in all, AMD will be selecting 80 people to receive gifts through several contests. The first contest will be for, interestingly enough, birthday videos. AMD will then be hosting another contest, this one soliciting pictures from its users. You can see specifics about what else they have in store here.