Apart from Intel Corp., no company produces and sells more processors -- or is more prominent in the semiconductor industry -- than Advanced Micro Devices. Better known by the acronym AMD, it is headquartered in Sunnydale, California. Although the company manufactures other products such as graphics processing units and motherboard chipsets, AMD processors still remain its most popular export.
History
Founded in 1969 by a team of former executives from semiconductor company Fairchild Semiconductor International, Inc., AMD started off as a producer of logic and random-access memory chips. Then in 1982, it signed an agreement with Intel as a secondary source for the production and supply of the 8086 and 8088, processors best known for their application on the first personal computers from International Business Machines. As IBM PCs became the standard for computer manufacturing in the1980s, AMD became one of the foremost processor companies, making chips based on Intel's x86 instruction set architecture.
Current Brands
At the time of publication, AMD offers a wide range of processor brands. The Athlon -- introduced in 1999 as a seventh-generational x86 processor -- is the most popular brand. Once the company's flagship brand, it has since been relegated to mid-range status by the Phenom, which debuted in 2007. At the other end of the spectrum is the low-end Sempron. The Turion serves as AMD's low-power, energy-efficient processor. All aforementioned brands are available for desktop and laptop PCs, except for the Turion which is only for the latter. The Opteron is AMD's server and workstation processor brand.
Design
Most AMD desktop and laptop processors are single- or dual-core chips. This means that they have one processing unit or two processing unit. The more cores a processor has, the greater processing power it generates. Some Phenom and Athlon processors have three, four or six cores, and the Sempron is restricted to a single core. The Opteron is generally AMD's most powerful brand, with some entries offering eight or even 12 cores.
Technologies
The current AMD processors are 64-bit processors; they use a 64-bit instruction set for accommodation of the absolute maximum data size. Each processor has AMD Virtualization Technology, which is the company's branded version of permitting multiple operating systems to share the processor's capabilities. Other popular technologies include Cool'n'Quiet for energy efficiency while providing optimal performance and 3DNow! for AMD processors' handing of graphics-based applications.
Tags: desktop laptop, most popular, processing unit