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’s hard to imagine any field of human activity where the help of computers isn’t in demand. They have become what the people can’t do without everywhere – in work, getting education, entertainment. Their expanding and general availability are the result of the huge step that the technical progress in the PC processors industry has made for the last 10 years.The productivity of processors is much higher than it was even 5 years ago, and the cost – lower.The other motive is the increasing competition among the companies producing processors.

The leading position at the market of processors was taken by Intel and there were no companies that could seriously compete with Intel. But the last 3 years it has to share the market with another processors producer called AMD - Advanced Micro 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 lines have expanded, its culture has evolved, and the individual successes of its people 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 AMD employees around the globe is a history highlighted by remarkable achievement. Since 1969, AMD has grown from afledgling start-up, headquartered in the living room of one of its founders, to a global corporation with annual revenues of $2.4 billion. The events that shaped AMD's growth, the strengths that will drive its future success, and a timeline encompassing AMD's defining moments are featured here.

1969-74 - Finding Opportunity

By May 1, 1969, Jerry Sanders and seven others had been toiling for months to pull together their scrappy start-up. The year before, Jerry had left his job as director of worldwide marketing at Fairchild Semiconductor, and he now found himself heading a team committed to a well-defined mission-building a successful semiconductor company by offering building blocks of ever-increasing complexity to benefit the manufacturers of electronic equipment in the computation, communication and instrumentation markets.

Although the company was initially headquartered in the living room of one of the co-founders, John Carey, it soon moved to two rooms in the back of a rugcutting company in Santa Clara. By September, AMD had raised the money it needed to begin manufacturing products and 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, products obtained from other companies that were then redesigned for greater speed and efficiency. "Parametric superiority" were the watchwords of AMD even then. To give the products even more of a selling edge, the company instituted a guarantee of quality unprecedented in the industry - all products would be made and tested to stringent MIL-STD-883,regardless of who the customer was and at no extra cost.

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

1974-79 - Defining the Future

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

On its fifth anniversary, AMD began what was to become a renowned tradition - it held a gala party, this one a street fair attended by employees and their families.

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

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1980 - 1983 - Finding Pre-eminence

The early 1980s were defined for AMD by two now-famous symbols. The first,called the "Age of Asparagus," represented the company's drive to increase the number of proprietary products offered to the marketplace. Like this lucrative crop, proprietary products take time to cultivate, but eventually bring excellent return on the initial investment. The second symbol was a giant ocean wave. The focus of "Catch the Wave" recruiting advertisements,the wave portrayed by the company as an unstoppable force in the integrated circuit business.

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AMD PROCESSORS

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

This CPU incorporated write-back cache and Enhanced power management features. These characteristics made the Am486 CPUs the perfect choice for Energy Star-compliant "green" desktop systems and for the growing portable market segment. With clock-tripled performance speeds up to 120 MHz, this CPU offered great price/performance value for both desktop and portable computers by providing power management and write-back Enhanced features at no extra premium.

The Am486 microprocessors featured Enhanced power management features, including SMM and clock control. These enhancements allowed reduced power consumption during system inactivity. The SMM function was implemented with an industry standard two-pin interface. In write-back mode, frequently used data were stored in the high-speed internal cache and accessed continually from within until the data were modified, thus increasing the performance of the CPU.

The Am5x86 Processor

The Am5x86 processor incorporated advanced features to achieve 586 performance. The Am5x86 CPU runed clock quadrupled at 133-MHz with a 33-MHz external bus. High-performance features such as a unified 16-Kbyte cache using write-back technology minimized the time the x86 core must have spent waiting for data or instructions, thereby accelerating all business and multimedia applications.

AMD's 0.35-micron process technology enabled AMD to deliver superior value with the Am5x86 processor. In addition, the design and pinout of the Am5x86 processor leveraged off 4th generation system costs, allowing manufacturers to position Am5x86 CPU-based systems as the best value for entry-level desktops or mainstream notebooks.

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The AMD-K5 Processor

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

The result was a superscalar processor solution capable of issuing four instructions per clock cycle­ twice as many as the Pentium. That was more than enough power to run complex 32-bit operating systems and applications, as well as the huge installed base of 16-bit software.

AMD designed the AMD-K5 processor to be pin compatible with the Pentium. And that was good news for PC manufacturers and resellers who wanted to leverage their existing PC designs and infrastructure while relying on an alternative source of processors. The bottom line: Pentium hardware/socket compatibility means no system redesign, lower design costs, and fast time tomarket.

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

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

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

This CPU ,code-named "Sharptooth", is basically a K6-2 with a 256K L2 (second level) cache incorporated in the chip. It's well-known that the L2 cache can cause huge impacts on the CPU's performance. By doing that, the K6-III has the fastest L2 cache on the market - only the extinct Pentium Pro and the extremely expensive Xeon Pentium II (a Pentium Pro in a Pentium II suit) share the same feature. Because it remains compatible with the Socket 7 standard, the motherboard L2 cache should become an L3 cache, which also increases the CPU's performance a little.

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

TriLevel Cache Design

AMD's TriLevel Cache design enables the AMD-K6-III processor to process instructions faster and deliver better performance at the same clock rate than the AMD-K6-2 processor and Intel's Pentium III.

AMD's innovative TriLevel Cache design maximizes the overall system performance of AMD-K6-III processor-based desktop PCs by delivering one of the industry's largest maximum combined system caches. This larger total cache results in higher system performance.

AMD's TriLevel Cache design is not only the largest cache implementation for desktop PCs, it is exceptionally fast.

The TriLevel Cache design also offers an internal multiport cache design. This flexible design feature delivers higher system performance by enabling simultaneous 64-bit reads and writes of both the L1 cache and the L2 cache. In addition, each cache can be accessed simultaneously by the processor core.

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The AMD-K7 Processor

The AMD-K7 design features a number of compelling technological breakthroughs, including the industry's first mainstream 200 MHz system bus and the most architecturally advanced floating point capability everdelivered in an x86 microprocessor.

The Microsoft Windows compatible AMD-K7 processor with 3DNow! technology offers seventh-generation design features that distinguish it from previous generations of PC processors. These innovations include a nine-issue superscalar microarchitecture optimized for high clock frequency,a superscalar pipelined floating point unit, 128KB of on-chip L1 cache, a programmable high-performance backside L2 cache interface,and a 200 MHz Alpha EV6-compatible system bus interface with support for scalable multiprocessing.

The AMD-K7 processor is expected to be available in July or August of 1999 and is planned to operate at clock frequencies faster than 500 MHz,based on AMD's 0.25-micron process technology. The AMD-K7 processor will leverage existing physical and mechanical PC infrastructure.

AMD K7 processor will definitely help AMD to compete with Intel's future Katmai processors and beyond.

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CONCLUSION

So with such processors as the AMD-K6-III and the AMD-K7 AMD is becoming the most serious competitor of the Intel company at the market of processors for PC. And this competition is breaking Intel’s monopoly braking the technical progress in the field of computer technologies, making the producers of processors invest more money in research and development of new technologies. The result of these is the increasing tempo of the technical progress. Now it’s hard to predict what processor we will see over the next 10 years.

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THE LIST 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

http://www.amd.com/

http://www.computerheaven.net/

Journals:”Computerra”

“Computer World”

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CONTENTS

Introduction___________________________________________________________________3

History of AMD________________________________________________________________4

AMD Processors_______________________________________________________________ 7

The Am486 Processor___________________________________________________________7

The Am5x86 Processor__________________________________________________________7

The AMD-K5 Processor_________________________________________________________7

The AMD-K6 Processor_________________________________________________________8

The AMD-K6-2 Processor_______________________________________________________ 8

3DNow! Technology____________________________________________________________8

The AMD-K6-III Processor______________________________________________________9

TriLevel Cache Design__________________________________________________________9

The AMD-K7 Processor_________________________________________________________9

Conclusion___________________________________________________________________10

The List of Key Words_________________________________________________________11

References___________________________________________________________________11