How was the company started, and how do they compare to intel for quality and performance?
AMD was first established on May 1, 1969 and started as a company working out of one of the co-founders living rooms. AMDS's main goal was simple, they wanted to create a successful semiconductor company. By September AMD had raised enough money to open their first permanent home, at 901 Thompson Place in Sunnyrak. By the end of AMD's fifth year, there was around fifteen hundred employees making over two hundred different products, in their first five years AMD made nearly $26.5 million in annual sales. AMD's sales steadily grew throughout the years until 1986 when the tides of change swept the industry and Japanese semiconductor makers began to dominate the market. AMD, along with the rest of the industry, began searching for new ways to compete with the market. The solution, AMD began building its submicron capability with the Submicron Development Center. AMD's new ability to compete in the market led to the development of their microprocessors compatible with IBM computers. AMD increased drastically through 1995 - 1999 due mainly to their increasingly competitive product offering. With the development of the AMD - K6 processor AMD was able to become a serious competitor to Intel in the microprocessor market.
AMD vs. Intel
In 1997 AMD introduced the first of a new line of processors, the k6, which was supposed to compute directly with Intels socket 7 CPU. The k6 processor had a definite edge over Intels chip. The k6 core was much more powerful then Intels and it also held a slight advantage in the MHZ department. Intel quickly countered the k6 with the PII putting Intel well in front of the CPU market. AMD began to challenge the market again a year later with the releasal of the K6-2 that had 100 MHz frontside bus and contained a new technology that enhanced 3d games without having a graphics accelerator. The k6-2 began selling slowly but it quickly caught on in the OEM markets and really caught on in the gaming worlds because of the 3D/Now technology that provided the extra edge that the gamers needed. Intel had control over the higher end computers but AMD was making a nice little hole in the gaming market until Intel tried to beat them again with the Celeron processor. At first AMD had no problem out doing the L2 cache less chip but with the introduction of the Celeron 300A, that could easily be overclocked between 400 and 450 MHz, going as high as 550 - 600 mhz with some luck and a lot of cooling, AMD was facing a problem. The only thing that allowed AMD to compete with the Celeron chip was its 3D/Now technology that still gave it the edge over the cheap and fast Celeron. A price war between AMD and Intel followed while AMD tried to compete with both the Celeron and the PII but in January of 1999 AMD actually outsold Intel. Though it was only one month of being the leader of the market it still gave the company the consumer confidence they needed to compete with Intel.