AMD began by copying Intel's chips and ended up worth more than Intel
When IBM built its personal computer in 1981, it demanded that Intel line up a second manufacturer for its processors. That clause handed a small Sunnyvale rival licensed access to the x86 family. Four decades later, in 2022, Advanced Micro Devices overtook Intel in stock-market value for the first time.
Jerry Sanders, marketing director at Fairchild Semiconductor and weary of its rigid culture, incorporated the company on May 1, 1969 with seven colleagues. By September they had moved into a 500,000 dollar, 15,000 square foot headquarters at 901 Thompson Place in Sunnyvale, which held everything including wafer production. To win customers quickly, they made chips designed by Fairchild and National Semiconductor, and promised quality to US military standards.
Its first product, the Am9300 shift register, was built in November 1969 and went on sale in 1970, the same year the Am2501 counter became its first in-house design. RAM chips followed in 1971, when yearly sales reached 4.6 million dollars. After going public in September 1972, AMD offered 212 products by 1975, 49 of them its own. That year it reverse-engineered Intel's 8080 as the Am9080, which led to a cross-licence on microcode effective October 1976. Siemens bought 20 per cent of the stock in 1977, sales topped 100 million dollars in 1978, and an Austin factory started up in 1979.
The 1981 IBM condition produced a ten-year technology exchange, signed that October and formalised in February 1982, so AMD churned out licensed 8086 and 8088 chips and its own Am286 by 1984. That year it also made the first 512K EPROM, and it entered the Fortune 500 in 1985. When Japanese dumping battered the market, it answered with the Liberty Chip programme, one new chip every week for 52 weeks in fiscal 1986.
Later bets reshaped it. NexGen, bought for 857 million dollars in January 1996, fed the K6 processor. Canadian graphics firm ATI cost about 5.4 billion dollars in 2006, though the ATI brand was retired in 2010. Its factories were spun off as GlobalFoundries with Abu Dhabi investors, leaving AMD a pure designer, and cheaper Ryzen processors in the late 2010s won back market share.
Source: AMD
