Реферат: История AMD

Министерство  Образования Российской  Федерадии

Санкт-Петербургский Государственный Технический Университет

Факультет Экономики и Менеджмента

                                                                                 Кафедра Иностранных Языков

РЕФЕРАТ

на тему

Advanced Micro Devices

Выполнил студент гр.3074/1

Кузьмин Павел Владимирович

Санкт-Петербург

1999

INTRODUCTION

Now-a-days it’shard to imagine any field of human activity where the help of computers isn’tin demand. They have become what the people can’t do without everywhere – inwork, getting education, entertainment. Their expanding and generalavailability are the result of the huge step that the technical progress in thePC processors industry has made for the last 10 years.The productivity ofprocessors is  much higher than it was even 5 years ago, and the cost –lower.The other motive is the increasing competition among the companiesproducing processors. 

The leadingposition at the market  of   processors was taken by Intel and there were nocompanies that could seriously compete with Intel. But the last 3 years it hasto share the market with another processors producer called AMD — AdvancedMicro Devices — the company  whose success is the point to be told about below.  

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HISTORY OF AMD

As the AMD story has unfolded, its product lineshave expanded, its culture has evolved, and the individual successes of itspeople have grown. Here's a brief summary of the three decades that have passed- and a very favorable indication of the years that lie ahead.

Among the things that unite AMDemployees around the globe is a history highlighted by remarkable achievement.Since 1969, AMD has grown from afledgling start-up, headquartered in the livingroom of one of its founders, to a global corporation with annual revenues of  $2.4billion. The events that shaped AMD's growth, the strengths that will drive its future success, and a timeline encompassing AMD'sdefining moments are featured here.

1969-74 — FindingOpportunity

By May 1, 1969, Jerry Sanders andseven others had been toiling for months to pull together their scrappystart-up. The year before, Jerry had left his job asdirector of worldwide marketing at Fairchild Semiconductor, and he now found himselfheading a team committed to a well-defined mission-building a successfulsemiconductor company by offering building blocks of ever-increasing complexityto benefit the manufacturers of electronic equipment in the computation,communication and  instrumentation markets.

Although the company was initiallyheadquartered in the living room of one of the co-founders, John Carey, it soonmoved to two rooms in the back of a rugcutting company in Santa Clara. BySeptember, AMD had raised the money it needed to begin manufacturing productsand moved into its first permanent home,901 Thompson Place in Sunnyvale.

During the company's first years,the vast majority of its products were alternate-source devices, productsobtained from other companies that were then redesigned for greater speed andefficiency. «Parametric superiority» were the watchwords of AMD eventhen. To give the products even more of a selling edge, the company instituteda guarantee of quality unprecedented in the industry — all products would bemade and tested to stringent MIL-STD-883,regardless of who the customer was andat no extra cost.

By the end of AMD's fifth year,there were nearly 1,500 employees making over 200 different products — many ofthem proprietary — and bringing in nearly $26.5 million in annual sales.

1974-79 — Defining theFuture

AMD's second five years gave theworld a taste of the company's most enduring trait--tenaciousness. Despite adogged recession in 1974-75, when sales briefly slipped, the company grewduring this period to $168 million, representing an average annual compoundgrowth rate of over 60 percent.

On its fifth anniversary, AMD beganwhat was to become a renowned tradition — it held a gala party, this one astreet fair attended by employees and their families.

This was also a period of tremendousfacilities expansion, including the construction of 915 DeGuigne in Sunnyvale,opening an assembly facility in Manila, Philippines, and expanding the Penangfactory.                                                  

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1980 — 1983 — Finding Pre-eminence

The early 1980s were defined for AMDby two now-famous symbols. The first,called the «Age of Asparagus,»represented the company's drive to increase the number of proprietary productsoffered to the marketplace. Like this lucrative crop, proprietary products taketime to cultivate, but eventually bring excellent return on the initialinvestment. The second symbol was a giant ocean wave. The focus of «Catchthe Wave» recruiting advertisements,the wave portrayed by the company asan unstoppable force in the integrated circuit business.

AMD became a leader in investment into research and development. By the end offiscal year 1981, the company had more than doubled its sales over 1979. Plants and facilities expanded with an emphasis on building in Texas. New production facilities were built in San Antonio, and more fab space was added to Austin as well. AMD had quickly become a major contender in the world semiconductor marketplace.

1984-1989 — Weathering Hard Times

AMD celebrated its 15th year with one of the best sales years in company history. In the months following AMD's anniversary, employees received record-setting profit sharing checks and celebrated Christmas with musical group Chicago in San Francisco and Joe King Carrasco and the Crowns in Texas.

By 1986, however, the tides of change had swept the industry. Japanese semiconductor makers came to dominate the memory markets — up until now a mainstay for AMD — and a fierce downturn had taken hold of the computer market, limiting demand for chips in general. AMD, along with the rest of the semiconductor industry, began looking for new ways to compete in an increasingly difficult environment.

By 1989, Jerry Sanders was talking about transformation: changing the entire company to compete in new markets. AMD began building its submicron capability with the Submicron Development Center.

1989-94 — Making the Transformation

Finding new ways to compete led to the concept of AMD's «Spheres of Influence.» For the transforming AMD, those spheres were microprocessors compatible with IBM computers, networking and communication chips, programmable logic devices, and high-performance memories. In addition, the company's long survival depended on developing submicron process technology that would fill its manufacturing needs into the next century.

By its 25th anniversary, AMD had put to work every ounce of tenaciousness it had to achieve those goals. Today, AMD is either #1 or #2 worldwide in everymarket it serves, including the Microsoft® Windows-compatible business, where the company has overcome legal obstacles to produce its own versions of the wildly popular Am386® and Am486® microprocessors. AMD has become a pre-eminent supplier of flash, EPROM, networking,telecommunications and programmable logic chips as well. And it is well on its way to bringing up another high-volume production area devoted to submicron devices. For the past three years, the company has enjoyed record sales and record operation income.

AMD looks very different today than it did 25 years ago. But it is still the tough, determined competitor it always was, weathering every challenge because of the unending strength of its people.

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1994-1999 — From Transformation to Transcendence

AMD's growth through the rest of the century will likely be fueled by the exploding demand for mobile computing and telecommunications devices, two markets for which AMD has spent years developing products. Key to the company's success will be building close relationships with its customers, and continuing to develop the manufacturing and process technologies necessary to produce future-generation submicron devices.

One thing is for certain, AMD's future will be shaped by the same principles that are woven into its past: a competitive drive, a focus on customers, innovative new products, and the ability to learn and adapt to change. Most of all, the company's future will be shaped by AMDers, the people whose efforts created a successful, and now legendary, company.

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AMDPROCESSORS

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTDHTML//EN">The Am486 Processor

This CPU incorporated write-back cacheand Enhanced power management features. These characteristics made the Am486CPUs the perfect choice for Energy Star-compliant «green» desktopsystems and for the growing portable market segment. With clock-tripledperformance speeds up to 120 MHz, this CPU offeredgreat price/performance value for both desktop and portable computers byproviding power management and write-back Enhanced features at no extrapremium.

The Am486 microprocessors featured Enhanced power management features, including SMM and clockcontrol. These enhancements allowed reduced powerconsumption during system inactivity. The SMM function was implemented with anindustry standard two-pin interface. In write-back mode, frequently used datawere stored in the high-speed internal cache and accessed continually fromwithin until the data were modified, thus increasing the performance of theCPU.

The Am5x86Processor

The Am5x86 processor incorporated advanced features toachieve 586 performance. The Am5x86 CPU runed clock quadrupled at 133-MHz witha 33-MHz external bus. High-performance features such as a unified 16-Kbyte cache using write-backtechnology minimized the time thex86 core must havespent waiting for dataor instructions, thereby accelerating all business and multimedia applications.

AMD's 0.35-micron process technologyenabled AMD to deliver superior value with the Am5x86 processor. In addition,the design and pinout of the Am5x86 processor leveragedoff 4th generation system costs, allowing manufacturers to position Am5x86CPU-based systems as the best value for entry-level desktops or mainstreamnotebooks.

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The AMD-K5 Processor

This processor's fifth-generationperformance stemed from AMD's independently conceived AMD-K5 superscalar corearchitecture, which combined highly efficient reduced instruction set computing(RISC) through put with complete x86 instruction-set compatibility.

The result was a superscalarprocessor solution capable of issuing four instructions per clock cycle­ twiceas many as the Pentium. That was more than enough power to run complex 32-bitoperating systems and applications, as well as the huge installed base of16-bit software.

AMD designed the AMD-K5 processor tobe pin compatible with the Pentium. And that was good news for PC manufacturersand resellers who wanted to leverage their existing PCdesigns and infrastructure while relying on an alternative source ofprocessors. The bottom line: Pentium hardware/socket compatibility means nosystem redesign, lower design costs, and fast time tomarket.

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As a member of AMD's E86 family of x86-based processors, the AMD-K6 gives systems developers access to the largest base of programmers and existing software while enabling powerful, cost-effective solutions for today's increasingly sophisticated embedded applications.

The AMD-K6 microprocessor has redefined the desktop PC market, providing sixth-generation performance at an affordable price. Now, embedded applications can benefit from the reliable, affordable computing power derived from this powerful microprocessor. The AMD-K6 microprocessor gives  embedded customers a significant performance boost which enables them to produce superior products.

For applications such as central office switches, point-of-sale terminals, information appliances and Windows based single board computers, the AMD-K6E microprocessor is an excellent choice for OEMs looking to take advantage of the x86 instruction set. They can continue to use the industry's mostprevalent architecture to produce products with high performance and fast time-to-market.

The AMD-K6-2 Processor<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTDHTML//EN">

The AMD-K6-2 processor offers a powerful combination of system price and performance and is the aleternative to Intel's Pentium II processor.

The AMD-K6-2 processor with 3DNow! technology delivers leading-edge, sixth-generation performance for today's demanding Microsoft® Windows® compatible homeand office applications. The 9.3-million-transistor AMD-K6-2 processor is manufactured on AMD's 0.25-micron, five-layer-metal process technology.

The distinctive chracteristic of  AMD-K6-2processor is 3D Now! technology.

AMD's 3DNow! technology is the first innovation to the x86 architecture that significantly enhances 3D graphics, multimedia, and other floating-point-intensive PC applications to enable a superior visual computing experience.

3DNow! technology is a set of 21 instructions that use SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) and other performance enhancements to open the performance bottleneck in the 3D graphics pipeline between the host CPU and the 3D graphics accelerator card.

3DNow! works hand-in-hand with leading 3D graphics accelerators to achieve faster frame rates on high-resolution scenes, improved physical modeling of real-world environments, realistic 3D graphics and images, and theater-quality audio and video.

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This processor isthe newest product of AMD issued in February of  the present year.

This CPU ,code-named«Sharptooth», is basically  a K6-2 with a256K L2 (second level) cache incorporated in the chip.It's well-known that the L2 cache can cause huge impacts on the CPU'sperformance. By doing that, the K6-III  has the fastestL2 cache on the market — only the extinct Pentium Pro and the extremelyexpensive Xeon Pentium II (a Pentium Pro in a Pentium II suit) share the samefeature. Because it remains compatible with the Socket 7 standard, themotherboard L2 cache should become an L3 cache, which also increases the CPU's performance a little.

This innovationbeing used in K6-III has got the name of the TriLevel Cache design.

TriLevelCache Design

AMD's TriLevel Cache design enablesthe AMD-K6-III processor to process instructions faster and deliver betterperformance at the same clock rate than the AMD-K6-2 processor and Intel's PentiumIII.

AMD's innovative TriLevel Cachedesign maximizes the overall system performance of AMD-K6-III processor-baseddesktop PCs by delivering one of the industry's largest maximum combined systemcaches. This larger total cache results in higher system performance.

AMD's TriLevel Cache design is notonly the largest cache implementation for desktop PCs, it is exceptionallyfast.

The TriLevel Cache design alsooffers an internal multiport cache design. This flexible design featuredelivers higher system performance by enabling simultaneous 64-bit reads andwrites of both the L1 cache and the L2 cache. In addition, each cache can beaccessed simultaneously by the processor core.

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TheAMD-K7 Processor

The AMD-K7 design features a numberof compelling technological breakthroughs, including the industry's firstmainstream 200 MHz system bus and the most architecturally advanced floatingpoint capability everdelivered in an x86 microprocessor.

The Microsoft Windows compatibleAMD-K7 processor with 3DNow! technology offers seventh-generation designfeatures that distinguish it from previous generations of PC processors. Theseinnovations include a nine-issue superscalar microarchitecture optimized forhigh clock frequency,a superscalar pipelined floating point unit, 128KB ofon-chip L1 cache, a programmable high-performance backside L2 cacheinterface,and a 200 MHz Alpha EV6-compatible system bus interface with supportfor scalable multiprocessing.

The AMD-K7 processor is expected tobe available in July or August of 1999 and is plannedto operate at clock frequencies faster than 500 MHz,based on AMD's 0.25-micronprocess technology. The AMD-K7 processor will leverage existing physical andmechanical PC infrastructure.

AMD K7 processorwill definitely help AMD to compete with Intel's future Katmai processors andbeyond.

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CONCLUSION

So with suchprocessors as the AMD-K6-III and the AMD-K7 AMD is becoming the most seriouscompetitor of the Intel company at the market of processors for PC. And thiscompetition is breaking Intel’s monopoly braking the technical progress in thefield of computer technologies, making the producers of processors invest moremoney in research and development of new technologies. The result of these isthe increasing tempo of the technical progress. Now it’s hard to predict  whatprocessor we will see over the next 10 years.

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THELIST OF KEY WORDS

AMD=Advanced Micro Devices

Intel=Intellegent Electronics

competition

processor

cache

CPU

portable

notebook

desktop

bus

enchancement

3Dnow! Technology

TriLevel Cache Design

REFERENCES

www.amd.com/

www.computerheaven.net/

Journals:”Computerra”

               “Computer World”

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CONTENTS

Introduction___________________________________________________________________3

History ofAMD________________________________________________________________4

AMDProcessors_______________________________________________________________ 7

The Am486Processor___________________________________________________________7

The Am5x86Processor__________________________________________________________7

The AMD-K5Processor_________________________________________________________7

The AMD-K6Processor_________________________________________________________8

The AMD-K6-2Processor_______________________________________________________ 8

3DNow!Technology____________________________________________________________8

The AMD-K6-IIIProcessor______________________________________________________9

TriLevel CacheDesign__________________________________________________________9

The AMD-K7Processor_________________________________________________________9

Conclusion___________________________________________________________________10

The List of KeyWords_________________________________________________________11

References___________________________________________________________________11