Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios, How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with How Stuff Works and I heart Radio and I love all things tech. And in our last episode, which was requested by listener Stephen, I left off with a m d's history in ninety six, when the company found itself reeling when Intel decided to cut ties. Up to that point, a m D had been in an agreement to act as a second source for Intel designed chips. Intel would get a licensing fee and a m D would be able to manufacture chips based on Intel's designs. But when a m D chips started to do better in performance tests than the Intel originals, things changed. Until ended a ten year agreement several years early, and the two companies would enter into a lengthy court battle that would ultimately go all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court. But we've got a few years to get through before we get to that. So Intel had introduced the eighty three eighty six microprocessor in nineteen eighty five, a year before it severed the agreement with a m D. The three eight six, as it was known, was a thirty two bit micro processor. It could run most older code designed for its predecessors, and was capable of faster clock rates, meaning it could run more operations per second, and it had a greater data bandwidth, which means it could run operations on larger amounts of information than the earlier chips could. Intel an a m D had set the stage for creating the standard in computer processing, and now Intel was determined to stand alone. A m D, for its part, have been designing its own version of the three eight six, called the get Ready for It a M three eight six, but Intel's decision to end the agreement through things into disarray. Intel argued that their agreement with a m D only covered the eight eighty six through the e D two eighty six family of micro processors, and that the three eight six and later iterations were excluded. A and D obviously disagreed with this interpretation of their agreement, claiming that all x eighty six derivatives were covered under this ten year plan that they had struck with Intel back in nineteen eighty two. At this same time, things were shifting in the PC market. You might remember from my episode about early computer systems that there used to be a ton of different types of PCs on the market in the late seventies and early eighties, each with its own hardware and operating system. The ones we think about today are Windows based machines and Mac computers as far as personal machines are concerned. But up through the early nineteen eighties, the field was much more crowded. You had companies like Tandy, Commodore, and Amiga and others competing with Apple and IBM. However, by the mid nineteen eighties the field had thinned out significantly. IBM had secured valuable deals with corporations, becoming known as the computer of choice for office workstations. Apple maintained a more niche market of users interested in the creative power of the Macintosh. Everyone else sort of began to fade away, and this left the IBM PC and it's compatible clones with the lion's share of the market. In fact, by the time Intel was trying to block a m D, the IBM PC market share had grown to about eighty four percent of all personal computers, so this was a really big deal. A m D had helped cement the X eight six chip as the go to microprocessor for computers, and now it looks like Intel was going to run away with the whole thing. Things were starting to smell a little anti competitive. Am D did still have an agreement to the underlying instruction set for the X eight six family of processors, so in some respects a m D was still in the game, but Intel wasn't going to share the actual physical design of the three six microprocessor with a m D. So the engineers at a m D set out to reverse engineer the three six and build their own version of it while the legal battle continued in the courts. Reverse engineering alone is a pretty fascinating subject. The basic concept is fairly intuitive. You take a technology and you examine it closely and you figure out what makes it tick, how does the tech actually do whatever it does. Then you go back and you build your own version of that technology based upon your understanding of how the starting example worked. So you're not starting off with some sort of blueprint or set of plans or instructions. You're sussing it out on your own based on existing instances of the technology. So it's a bit like detective work. Between reverse engineering and the legal battles. It would be years before a m D could bring its own three eight six chips to market. The company began releasing its version starting in nineteen, and once again a m D S version of Intel's chips were clocking in at a faster clock rate than the competition. Intel's three eight six chips maxed out at thirty three mega hurts, whereas a m D S could hit forty mega hurts. The legal battles continued, and a m D began to invest in designing its own microcode for chips. Intel's next microprocessor was predictably the eight four eight six, and a m D created its own version the A M four eight six. Some A M for eight six chips had Intel microcode from the x A D six agreement and others had a m D microcode, making it a little confusing, and all of them were outpacing Intel's version of the same chip. Even the top of the line microprocessor in Intel's forty six line was left behind. The fastest four D six from Intel had the top clock speed of one hundred mega hurts. A m D S version was able to reach speeds of one D twenty mega hurts. Now this was in When that legal battle I talked about finally concluded, the courts found in favor of A m D, granting the company some royalty free use of some of Intel's patents and awarding A m D millions of dollars in the process. But the whole endeavor had taught the engineers at A m D a valuable lesson. While they had won this battle, there was no guarantee that things would remain stable between Intel and a m D, so the company did release another x E D six derived chip. This one was called the A m D five x eight six, or five by eighty six if you wanted to think of it that way. And you may be thinking, ha, I never heard of a five eight six computer. I'm pretty sure that Intel switched over from four A D six to pentium, and you would be right. The A m D five x eight six chip was based off the same architecture as the A M four eight six microprocessor, but it did manage an even faster clock speed out of the box. It was a hundred thirty Mega hurts, but original equipment manufacturers or o e m s in the biz could get an even faster version than maxed out at a hundred fifty Mega hurts now according to Tom's Hardware, a website, which is, by the way, a great resource if you ever want to learn everything there is to know about just about any computer component you can think of. The A M four, A D six, and the five X eighty six processors also moved the floating point unit or FPU over to the central processing unit or CPU itself. Up until then, it had been customary to have separate CPUs and FPUs that would connect to each other through the motherboard. So I guess it's time to give a quick explanation about what these things actually mean. The CPU, I'm sure you've all heard of, right, It's sort of the head manager of your computer. It executes basic instructions. In the event that the instructions require the use of a specialized chip like a graphics processing unit also known as a GPU, the CPU can delegate those tasks to the appropriate hardware. It's a high functioning component of a computer. We often refer to it as the brains of the computer, but really it's just calling the shots at the highest level. The floating point unit carries out instructions on what are called floating point numbers. A floating point number is a workaround for a particular problem, which is how a computer represents real numbers. The range of real numbers is infinite, but a computer can't handle that. A computer has a limited capacity, so programmers use floating point numbers, so called because the decimal point has no fixed number of digits that have to appear before or after it. This allows programmers to represent numbers separated by many orders of magnitude. You can have incredibly large numbers paired with incredibly small numbers using this approach. UH typically you would use a variant of scientific notation for those really big or really small numbers. However, this does mean that much of the work computers do happens as approximations rather than as precise calculations, and this introduces the possibility of error. The more you are approximating something, the less accurate or precise it's going to be, particularly as you perform more calculations based on previous approximations. As these approximations start to add up, you can potentially get further and further away from a correct or true answer. But never mind that that's a discussion for a different episode. Now, after the four a D six, Intel came out with the first Pentium processor. So why did Intel change things up? Why did Intel go from four D six to pentium? Because the Pentium still followed the x A D six architecture and instruction set and spoiler alert, so do today's computers. So why would Intel choose pentium instead of sticking with the naming convention it had created. Why wasn't it the five eight six? Well, the main reason was, as I'm sure many of you have guessed that companies like A m D were the cause of this. Intel decided because of a m D, Intel couldn't trademark a number. Intel couldn't have five eighty six trademarked. You can't just trademarket basic number like that. So if it had stuck with the numbering system, a m D could then come out with its A m D five a D six and with its reputation for outpacing Intel's comparable chips, that could hurt Intel's sales. But Pentium, that was different because Pentium was a name. You can trademark a name, and that's what Intel did. It trademarked the term pentium, which prevented a m D and other competitors from using that name on their own chips. So now it added a marketing concern for these competitors. How would they be able to market their own chips and compare them against Intel's chips without using a trademarked name that they did not have the rights to. It was kind of throwing a monkey wrench into things. Now. The way companies got around this was to include a number that they referred to as PR, which essentially stood for pentium rating. The number next to the PR designation would indicate the comparable pentium clock speed that the chip in question would be most like. So if you came out with a microchip and you gave it a PR rating of one hundred, what that tells the end consumer is that the chip you have put out is equivalent to an Intel pentium processor that has a clock speed of one mega hurts. So it's kind of a way of getting around the fact that they could not call their own chips their variance of the Pendium processor. Now it was clear that Intel was going to put up a fight and resist as much as it could. It would make little sense for a m D to depend solely upon being a second source for Intel. Chips, particularly when Intel wasn't really interested in cooperating fully, and so A m D began work on designing its own x eight six based microprocessor, which would be released in n and it became known as the A m D K five. Well why was it called the K five? Well, by A m D s reckoning, it represented the fifth generation microprocessor family that A m D had built, the other four being second source Intel chips, but the K five was a totally new architecture that was based on the x A D six instruction set. So why the K Well, because K is also the letter that starts the word kryptonite, the substance that could bring down Superman. And I think we can all guess who was Superman in this particular scenario. A m D designed the K five entirely in house, and it was the first x A D six processor from A m D to have architecture designed by the A m D team itself, as opposed to either following Intel's detailed instructions to make a clone of their chips or through reverse engineering and existing Intel microchip. The K five copied some elements from the earlier A M twenty nine thousand microprocessor that was a risk or R I s C microchip the company made a few years earlier. I talked about that in the previous episode, and I think that was a pretty good choice. It gave them a starting point to work from, and they were able to really build on that and make a success out of it. The K five's design was a little bit complicated, and that placed limits on how much clock speed a m D could get out of it. But at the same time, the A m D engineers had made the operations really efficient, so while it might have a technically lower clock speed than a competing microprocessor, this increased efficiency helped balance things out so that at the end result it seemed like the K five was actually faster than its counterparts that technically had higher clock speeds. Yes, the other microprocessors could run more operations per second, but K five's efficiency was such that was able to make up for that lost ground. Now, when we come back, i'll talk more about a m d s experiences in the nineteen nineties and beyond, but first let's take a quick break. A m D would follow up the K five with a microprocessor called the now wait for it, the Case six, But the K six wasn't designed by a m D engineers, nor did it follow the K five architecture. Instead, A m D acquired another microchip manufacturing company called next Gen an e x G E N. Next Gen was getting ready to release a CPU it called the n X six eight six, but then A m D swooped in, bought up next Gen, and then repurpose the as yet unreleased n X six eight six to become the K six. A m D marketed it as an alternative for Intel's Pentium two processor, claiming that for less money you could get the same level of performance, and that was mostly true, though the Pentium two had some advantages over the Case six, namely a better math coprocessor or FPU. At this point, the K six and the variance I'll talk about in a second we're still compatible with Intel designed motherboards. The Case six was also cheaper than the pent Um two chips, and so the Case six became a popular choice for both O E M s and people building their own machines. A m D would follow up the Case six with the Case six two and the Case six three in nine. The Case six three paired two hundred fifty six L two cash memory on the CPU die in an effort to speed up processing and increasing the amount of data the CPU could access at any given time. The Case six too, was phenomenally successful, so much so that some analysts estimated that seventy percent of the under one thousand dollar PC market in nine had a m D K six two chips powering them. So, if you were building a computer on a budget and you wanted to get the most umph for your dollars, chances are you were going with a m D. The company would also release the Case six two plus in the Case six three plus in two thousands. These were microprocessors meant specifically for the mobile market, and they'd be the final entries in the Case six line of CPUs. Meanwhile, Jerry Sanders, whom you might remember from the first episode, he was the first president of a m D. He was a co founder and at this point was the CEO of the company, was riding high. He predicted astronomical share prices for the company in the near future. He continued the company's practice of building fabrication plants at a breakneck pace. He was building plants to manufacture microprocessors and semiconductor chips all over the world. A m D had been incredibly aggressive in building and staffing these fabrication facilities in order to meet the demand for microprocessors and actually to anticipate the next demand for them, and Sanders had adopted a reportedly lavish lifestyle, maintaining an off us in Beverly Hills, which is pretty darn far from Silicon Valley and the headquarters of a m D. I guess he never really gave up his dream of going into the recording industry, but a lavish lifestyle might be fine if things continued to go well for the company, and sadly that would not be the case. Sanders spending also seemed to trickle its way into the corporate culture of a m D overall, with executives and high ranking salesforce professionals spending greater amounts of money to curate an image of luxury and sophistication. Spending was getting out of hand, and a lot of that spending had to do with those fabrication facilities. According to Autika Raza, who had led next Gen before a m D had acquired that company and then later became the president and chief operating officer or CEO of a m D. Sanders was in a bad habit of building fabrication facilities too far in advance, at least according to Raza's analysis. His perspective, that is, Roza's perspective, was that the company should hold off building new facilities until the need was there. Sanders was building them ahead of the game, but that would mean that a m D was constantly raising money to build out the next facility in advance of any revenue it was generating, and if the industry were to ever dip, then it would leave a m D over extended. So Raza wanted to take a different route. He wanted to use revenues from current successes to fuel expansion on an as needed basis. In other words, you don't need to go out and build a new fabrication plant until the demand requires you to do it. Raza, who at one time had been viewed as a potential successor to Sanders, found himself in direct disagreement with the founder, and he would actually leave a m D in n reportedly after a massive falling out with Sanders, with whom he would never speak again. Now his successor was a guy named Hector Ruez, who had up to that time been heading up a division over at Motorola. Ruez was first wary of taking this job. It was more technically oriented industry than he had been used to, and he knew about Sanders and his reputation of alienating senior level staff. And he saw that there had been a string of chief operating officers, several of whom were rumored to be groomed as the heir apparent to a m D who had subsequently left the company. But he figured that Sanders might have issues relinquishing control to others, that this could cause issues, but Sanders was still a very impressive person. A m D was an impressive company, so Hector decided to take the job. Then Jerry Sanders would retire in the early two thousand's and Ruez would take over the company, and he began to clean house. He got rid of several top executives who had been around for quite some time in the Sanders era, and he started bring in new people, new talent. So Ruiz also saw that the market was changing, and while a m D was being innovative in CPUs and other microchips meant for personal computers, it was really making most of its profits from selling flash memory not CPUs, and so he started to refocus the company to that endeavor, but he also found that a m D was holding an odd place in the market. Ruez would write a book about his experiences, stating that Sanders had created this sort of weird paradox in a m D because Sanders had a real can do attitude, a a never say die approach to business. But at the same time, no one in the company ever seemed convinced that a m D could really go toe to toe with Intel, that a m D would always be a tiny company compared to Intel, that could never really take over as the leading microchip manufacturer in the industry. That that was just sort of this underlineing philosophy at a m D. And as possibly because a m D had built its business largely on being a second source chip company. So Rule has tried to change things, directing a m d s efforts at not just flash memory, but also developing premium processors for stuff like Internet servers, which were just starting to become a serious thing at the time. Now, around that same time, a m D and Intel faced off again in courtrooms. This time it was in the European Union. A m D complained to the European Commission that Intel was engaging in anti competitive behavior, violating the law, primarily through what am D described as abusive marketing campaigns. A m D even tried to use legal means to secure documents from a separate case against Intel. This one was brought against Intel by a company called Intergraph. But then the Intergraph case eventually settled out of court and things were obviously still very choppy between a m D and Intel, despite the fact that they still had this cross licensing agreement. The next chip from a m D, the Case seven, better known as the Athlon processor, changed things up again. Now the details get pretty technical, but an easy thing to understand is that the company was able to push clock rates up to one giga hurts. A m D also began to manufacture its own motherboards, anticipating that the day might come when compatibility with Intel's motherboards would come to an end. So, hey, what the heck is a motherboard? I mentioned it a couple of times in this episode. A motherboard is just a printed circuit board. It's sort of the highway system for information inside a computer. The motherboard typically has connectors into which you can plug other circuits like a CPU as a circuit, so you can plug a CPU into a motherboard or a GPU a graphics processing unit. The motherboard provides the physical connections between all these different components so that these circuits can send proper command ends to the right places. Now, not all CPUs or GPUs for that matter, are compatible with all motherboards. Motherboards can accept certain types of CPUs and not others, and that's one of the reasons it's really important to research first before you set out to build your first computer. It's entirely possible to pick up sweet components that look great on paper but ultimately won't work together because they're incompatible. So a m D set out to build its own computer platform. But in this case, Intel was able to outperform a m D. While a m d S processors were blazing, the motherboard chip set as a whole wasn't quite able to match Intel's four four zero b X component. Still, it showed that a m D was going to push hard to compete with Intel. A m D also introduced a new line of chips designed for entry level machines. These were running on a similar architecture as the Athalon processors, but that will lower clock speed. They called the new line of processors DURAN, and they competed against Intel's Cellern line of processors meant for the same market. A m D upgraded the Athlon family steadily year over year with names like Thunderbird, Palomino, Thoroughbred, and Barton. With each chip, a m D built upon what it had learned from the previous generation. The components sizes got smaller, Thoroughbred and Barton were built using a one thirty nanometer process and the clock speeds were climbing past two giga hurts. A m D was optimizing the architecture for memory access. Things were going pretty smoothly, and then a m D dropped a bombshell. The company that had built a business out of being a second source chip manufacturer actually beat Intel to the punch by releasing the first consumer oriented sixty four bit x eight six processor, the Athalon sixty four. Now, I've been explaining a lot of basic computer concepts here, so why not include sixty four bit? Ver is thirty two bit? So the consumer focused processors up to that point where thirty two bit processors. That means the processors were able to work with data units that were thirty two bits wide. Now, remember a bit is a single unit of information. It can be either a zero or a one. Eight bits is a byte or an octet, and thirty two bits would be four octets wide. A thirty two bit system can handle a range of two to the thirty second power number of values. So if we want to describe all the values that a thirty two bit number can describe, and we start with the number zero, we would go all the way up to four billion, two hundred ninety four million, nine hundred sixty seven thousand, two hundred nine five. That's the range of values a thirty two bit system can handle. Now, as the name implies, a sixty four bit system can handle a data width of sixty four bits, And you might be tempted to think that that means it can handle twice as much data as a thirty two bit system, but that's not how binary works. A sixty four bit system can handle a value range of two to the sixty four power of values, which is more than eighteen quintillion values. That is a very big number, much much bigger than the eight and a half billion or so that would be twice the thirty two bit range values, so you're not talking about doubling, you're talking much much larger than that. So a sixty four bit system can perform many more calculations per second. It can also support more RAM. A thirty two bit system maxes out at four gigabytes of RAM, or two to the thirty second power bytes of memory. A sixty four bit system would max out at least in theory at eighteen XO bytes of RAM, which I can't describe as anything other than a crap ton of random access memory. But six four bit CPUs can't quite reach that theoretical limit, and they max out in the terrabyte scale, not the exo byte scale. Still, that's a lot more memory than thirty two bit systems can handle. Now, sixty four bit systems had been around since the nineteen sixties, but had only seen use in academic settings and internally in various companies. No one had yet made a sixty four bit processor for the general public before A. M D and Microsoft released a sixty four bit version of Windows that such processors could leverage. And just to be clear, a thirty two bit system can't run sixty four bit software, but most sixty four bit systems can run either a thirty two bit or a sixty four bit version of operating systems. Now, I've got some more to say about what a m D has been up to, but first let's take another quick break. Am D, for the first time, had been the first to market with a microchip innovation. This led to Intel licensing the sixty four bit instruction set from a m D. Ah how the tables have turned Now, Intel, so used to being the entity to define standards was instead having to follow the lead of the upstart company. No never mind that both Intel and am D had been around since the late nineteen sixties, and a m D was really just a year younger than Intel was. I can only imagine things were tense in some of those meetings over at Intel headquarters, and a m D wasn't done knocking the socks off computer nerds like me. In two thousand five, the company released the athlont X two micro processor, which was the first x a D six dual core processor. Now, these days, multi core processors are the norm for many computer systems and even handheld devices, but this was brand new for the consumer market back in two thousand five, So what the heck is a dual core or multi core proces sessor. Now, I always like to use the analogy of a math class that has one superstar pupil and then a bunch of smart math students who don't quite measure up to superstar status. The superstar pupil represents a single core CPU that is significantly powerful. The smart math students represent a multi core processor. Each individual core of this multi core processor is less powerful than the super strong single CPU, but collectively those students can tackle some problems and solve them faster than the superstar. And we refer to those types of problems as being parallel problems, and that the cores are all executing operations in parallel with each other rather than in sequence. So here's the example. A math teacher hands out a pop quiz. The superstar has to answer eight questions on the quiz, all eight. The smart math students, of which there are eight, must each answer just one of those questions. So students one gets questioned one, student two gets questioned two, and so on. So who finishes first? Now, while the superstar might get through a couple of problems before any of the classmates have finished his or her individual problem, Ultimately, the class is going to finish First, they solved the test in parallel, each taking one part of the problem. So even though the superstar is technically better at math than they are, they can't answer those questions in sequence as quickly as the group can in parallel. Now, it's important to note that not all computational problems are parallel in nature, So for those problems, a really powerful single core processor is going to do better than the multi core approach, and a m D s early dual core processor couldn't work on the same thread at all, but one core could work on a thread of operations while the other core worked on unrelated computational problems, and that sped things up. Overall, both the sixty four bit consumer processor and the dual core innovation were phenomenal achievements in the world of consumer computers. A m D will never quite catching up to Intel's marketing with the whole Intel inside thing, was proving itself to be a capable and competitive player in the space, at least on a technological level. Business Wise, things were a bit less peppy. A m D was producing more chips than it could sell, and that was probably part of that whole crazy fabrication plant strategy Sanders had pursued in the nineties. They were literally making more chips than they had orders for. In two thousand one, a m D posted a net loss of sixty one million dollars, but the following year it was incredible. It was a loss of one point three billion dollars. In two thousand three it was another two seventy four million dollar loss. This is not a trend you want to see, Tenue. Now, while the company was introducing innovations, it was still battling its nemesis, Intel in the courtrooms. A m D brought another anti competitive suit against Intel in two thousand four two thousand five, this time in the United States. The complaint was forty eight pages long and accused Intel of using a monopolistic approach to strong armed companies to work with Intel rather than with a m D. At this point, a m D had several lawsuits against Intel pending in various courts, and in two thousand nine, Intel bargained a settlement agreement with a m D. Intel executives promised that their company would abide by a list of rules to avoid anti competitive practices. Now, according to c NET, The settlement included a payout to a m D to the tune of one point to five billion dollars wolf That certainly can help in an era where the company is losing money through sales. Intel also would introduce its famous tick talk Strata G, in which the company would first design a new microchip architecture, typically by reducing the size of the individual components from the previous generation's architecture and then cramming more components onto a single chips So, in other words, you say, let's take the design from the last generation of microchips, make everything smaller, add more to it, and release that. Then they would follow this up with the talk part of the cycle. They would dedicate research and development to find out how to best optimize the new smaller components to create a new architecture that makes the best use out of that. So the tick is the new architecture or the new the smaller components, and the talk was the new optimization of that. Each generation of chips represented either a take or a talk. This helped reduce risk and expenses on Intel's research and development and helped the company mount a counter attack against a m D. A m D got aggressive in the wake of their innovation. In two thousand six, the company acquired a graphics card company called A t I Technologies Incorporated for more than five billion dollars. A t I had launched in the mid eighties in Canada and had become known for their graphics processing units, and for a while a m D would market graphics processing cards under the A t I brand name. In fact, in many ways, a TI continued to perform as if it were a subsidiary company and not a true part of a m D, something that in hindsight, critics have suggested was a problem. According to an Ours Technica article that was titled up the Rise and Fall of a m D. Highly recommend you read that, by the way, it's a two part article, and it's fantastic. People within the company tended to gravitate toward either the CPU side of the business or the GPU side of the business, and both sides were competing over the same set of resources. Now, competition within a single company isn't always a great thing, and it led to tension within a m D. As well's delays in product development. A m d S CPU quality was starting to slide as well. The Optron processor called Barcelona didn't ship on time, and when it did finally come out, it had a bug in the design that, when fixed, slowed the chips performance speed by about ten percent. A few years later, the Bulldozer processor had similar issues. In retrospect, some engineers fault the acquisition for dividing the focus of the company and the lack of an overall roadmap for being the reason that the company was reeling a little bit. Meanwhile, PC sales in general were slowing down as the world began to shift more toward mobile computing. A m D found itself in choppy waters again. Ru has managed to take care of one big problem, the fabrication facilities that were making far too many chips for a m D to sell. He arranged a deal with a group of investors from Abu Dhabi to sell off a m D s fabrication plants. The idea was that m D would negotiate production contracts with this new company, and that new company could also accept fabrication contracts from other manufacturers, since the production capacity for all the fabrication plants exceeded what am D needed. Not long after that, Ruez would step down as CEO. Dirk Meyer, who had worked on the design of a m D s K seven chip, became the new CEO. Alan Remember when I said A m D and Intel settled that lawsuit in two thousand nine. One reason a m D might have agreed to come to the table with a settlement was that Intel lawyers were claiming the agreement between a m D and Intel to cross license the X eight six instruction set was only valid if a m D was both the designer and the fabricator of the chips. But now am D was outsourcing fabrication and that, according to Intel's lawyers, was in violation of the agreement. So it's possible a m D came to the table to negotiate a settlement in order to avoid a judgment on that point. Meyer would serve as CEO from two thousand eight to two thousand eleven. He was effectively removed from the position by the A m D board analysts at the time, We're a bit surprised. Meyer had been focusing on the traditional CPU market and making a MD competitive there, with plans to address the mobile market a little bit later further down the road. He wanted to get the CPU thing right first and then switch over to mobile. Now, it's possible that the board objected to that strategy and wanted someone who would lead the company to compete in the mobile space more aggressively, as that was the perceived area for growth. This was an era where it became clear that mobile was going to be the future of computers. After a CEO search, Rory Reid was selected to lead the company. Read diversified a m d S approach beyond the PC market, and Read was able to guide the company into entering new markets while lowering operating costs. In two thousand fourteen, he would step down as CEO. He said that that was the plan the whole time, that he was there just as sort of an interim CEO to make some business level changes to a m D and get the company on the right track. But he didn't have a deep background in engineering. A m d's next and current CEO did, and that is Lisa Sue. Since the nineteen nineties, Lisa Sue has worked in the semiconductor industry. She started over at Texas Instruments on the technical staff. She's also worked at IBM and Free Scale Semiconductor. Before she joined a m D. She served as the chief operating officer before being named the new president and CEO of the company, and under her leadership, a m D has done rather well. In two thousand seventeen, the company had a revenue of five point three three billion dollars. That was a growth over the previous year. Also, and remarkably, seventeen would be the first year that a m D would post a full year of profitability, meaning there were no quarters where they post in a loss. While the company would come out profitable in previous years, it always had quarters that had a loss in those years, so things really had changed. Not just a few years ago, lots of people were ready to write off a m D. The company was posting massive losses and it cut back jobs. It looked like it over extended itself. It looked like it was just not going to measure up against the competition, and the product quality appeared to be slipping. But more recently things have seemed to turn around, and perhaps we've yet to see the greatest achievements from a company that was able to shock the world by beating Intel to the punch. Who knows what they might do next. When that wraps up these episodes about the history of a m D. Thanks again, Stephen for sending in that request. I greatly appreciate it. I hope you guys enjoyed learning more about this semiconductor and microprocessor company. They are fascinating. They continue to be fascinating. So uh, that's that for that story. If you guys have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's a company, a technology, maybe a personality in tech, whatever it may be, why not send me an email about it. The addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com. You can pop on over to our website that's tech stuff podcast dot com. You're gonna find an archive of all of our previous episodes, links to our social media presence, as well as a link to our online store, where every purchase you make goes to help the show. And we greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios, How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with How Stuff Works and I heart Radio and I love all things tech. And in our last episode, which was requested by listener Stephen, I left off with a m d's history in ninety six, when the company found itself reeling when Intel decided to cut ties. Up to that point, a m D had been in an agreement to act as a second source for Intel designed chips. Intel would get a licensing fee and a m D would be able to manufacture chips based on Intel's designs. But when a m D chips started to do better in performance tests than the Intel originals, things changed. Until ended a ten year agreement several years early, and the two companies would enter into a lengthy court battle that would ultimately go all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court. But we've got a few years to get through before we get to that. So Intel had introduced the eighty three eighty six microprocessor in nineteen eighty five, a year before it severed the agreement with a m D. The three eight six, as it was known, was a thirty two bit micro processor. It could run most older code designed for its predecessors, and was capable of faster clock rates, meaning it could run more operations per second, and it had a greater data bandwidth, which means it could run operations on larger amounts of information than the earlier chips could. Intel an a m D had set the stage for creating the standard in computer processing, and now Intel was determined to stand alone. A m D, for its part, have been designing its own version of the three eight six, called the get Ready for It a M three eight six, but Intel's decision to end the agreement through things into disarray. Intel argued that their agreement with a m D only covered the eight eighty six through the e D two eighty six family of micro processors, and that the three eight six and later iterations were excluded. A and D obviously disagreed with this interpretation of their agreement, claiming that all x eighty six derivatives were covered under this ten year plan that they had struck with Intel back in nineteen eighty two. At this same time, things were shifting in the PC market. You might remember from my episode about early computer systems that there used to be a ton of different types of PCs on the market in the late seventies and early eighties, each with its own hardware and operating system. The ones we think about today are Windows based machines and Mac computers as far as personal machines are concerned. But up through the early nineteen eighties, the field was much more crowded. You had companies like Tandy, Commodore, and Amiga and others competing with Apple and IBM. However, by the mid nineteen eighties the field had thinned out significantly. IBM had secured valuable deals with corporations, becoming known as the computer of choice for office workstations. Apple maintained a more niche market of users interested in the creative power of the Macintosh. Everyone else sort of began to fade away, and this left the IBM PC and it's compatible clones with the lion's share of the market. In fact, by the time Intel was trying to block a m D, the IBM PC market share had grown to about eighty four percent of all personal computers, so this was a really big deal. A m D had helped cement the X eight six chip as the go to microprocessor for computers, and now it looks like Intel was going to run away with the whole thing. Things were starting to smell a little anti competitive. Am D did still have an agreement to the underlying instruction set for the X eight six family of processors, so in some respects a m D was still in the game, but Intel wasn't going to share the actual physical design of the three six microprocessor with a m D. So the engineers at a m D set out to reverse engineer the three six and build their own version of it while the legal battle continued in the courts. Reverse engineering alone is a pretty fascinating subject. The basic concept is fairly intuitive. You take a technology and you examine it closely and you figure out what makes it tick, how does the tech actually do whatever it does. Then you go back and you build your own version of that technology based upon your understanding of how the starting example worked. So you're not starting off with some sort of blueprint or set of plans or instructions. You're sussing it out on your own based on existing instances of the technology. So it's a bit like detective work. Between reverse engineering and the legal battles. It would be years before a m D could bring its own three eight six chips to market. The company began releasing its version starting in nineteen, and once again a m D S version of Intel's chips were clocking in at a faster clock rate than the competition. Intel's three eight six chips maxed out at thirty three mega hurts, whereas a m D S could hit forty mega hurts. The legal battles continued, and a m D began to invest in designing its own microcode for chips. Intel's next microprocessor was predictably the eight four eight six, and a m D created its own version the A M four eight six. Some A M for eight six chips had Intel microcode from the x A D six agreement and others had a m D microcode, making it a little confusing, and all of them were outpacing Intel's version of the same chip. Even the top of the line microprocessor in Intel's forty six line was left behind. The fastest four D six from Intel had the top clock speed of one hundred mega hurts. A m D S version was able to reach speeds of one D twenty mega hurts. Now this was in When that legal battle I talked about finally concluded, the courts found in favor of A m D, granting the company some royalty free use of some of Intel's patents and awarding A m D millions of dollars in the process. But the whole endeavor had taught the engineers at A m D a valuable lesson. While they had won this battle, there was no guarantee that things would remain stable between Intel and a m D, so the company did release another x E D six derived chip. This one was called the A m D five x eight six, or five by eighty six if you wanted to think of it that way. And you may be thinking, ha, I never heard of a five eight six computer. I'm pretty sure that Intel switched over from four A D six to pentium, and you would be right. The A m D five x eight six chip was based off the same architecture as the A M four eight six microprocessor, but it did manage an even faster clock speed out of the box. It was a hundred thirty Mega hurts, but original equipment manufacturers or o e m s in the biz could get an even faster version than maxed out at a hundred fifty Mega hurts now according to Tom's Hardware, a website, which is, by the way, a great resource if you ever want to learn everything there is to know about just about any computer component you can think of. The A M four, A D six, and the five X eighty six processors also moved the floating point unit or FPU over to the central processing unit or CPU itself. Up until then, it had been customary to have separate CPUs and FPUs that would connect to each other through the motherboard. So I guess it's time to give a quick explanation about what these things actually mean. The CPU, I'm sure you've all heard of, right, It's sort of the head manager of your computer. It executes basic instructions. In the event that the instructions require the use of a specialized chip like a graphics processing unit also known as a GPU, the CPU can delegate those tasks to the appropriate hardware. It's a high functioning component of a computer. We often refer to it as the brains of the computer, but really it's just calling the shots at the highest level. The floating point unit carries out instructions on what are called floating point numbers. A floating point number is a workaround for a particular problem, which is how a computer represents real numbers. The range of real numbers is infinite, but a computer can't handle that. A computer has a limited capacity, so programmers use floating point numbers, so called because the decimal point has no fixed number of digits that have to appear before or after it. This allows programmers to represent numbers separated by many orders of magnitude. You can have incredibly large numbers paired with incredibly small numbers using this approach. UH typically you would use a variant of scientific notation for those really big or really small numbers. However, this does mean that much of the work computers do happens as approximations rather than as precise calculations, and this introduces the possibility of error. The more you are approximating something, the less accurate or precise it's going to be, particularly as you perform more calculations based on previous approximations. As these approximations start to add up, you can potentially get further and further away from a correct or true answer. But never mind that that's a discussion for a different episode. Now, after the four a D six, Intel came out with the first Pentium processor. So why did Intel change things up? Why did Intel go from four D six to pentium? Because the Pentium still followed the x A D six architecture and instruction set and spoiler alert, so do today's computers. So why would Intel choose pentium instead of sticking with the naming convention it had created. Why wasn't it the five eight six? Well, the main reason was, as I'm sure many of you have guessed that companies like A m D were the cause of this. Intel decided because of a m D, Intel couldn't trademark a number. Intel couldn't have five eighty six trademarked. You can't just trademarket basic number like that. So if it had stuck with the numbering system, a m D could then come out with its A m D five a D six and with its reputation for outpacing Intel's comparable chips, that could hurt Intel's sales. But Pentium, that was different because Pentium was a name. You can trademark a name, and that's what Intel did. It trademarked the term pentium, which prevented a m D and other competitors from using that name on their own chips. So now it added a marketing concern for these competitors. How would they be able to market their own chips and compare them against Intel's chips without using a trademarked name that they did not have the rights to. It was kind of throwing a monkey wrench into things. Now. The way companies got around this was to include a number that they referred to as PR, which essentially stood for pentium rating. The number next to the PR designation would indicate the comparable pentium clock speed that the chip in question would be most like. So if you came out with a microchip and you gave it a PR rating of one hundred, what that tells the end consumer is that the chip you have put out is equivalent to an Intel pentium processor that has a clock speed of one mega hurts. So it's kind of a way of getting around the fact that they could not call their own chips their variance of the Pendium processor. Now it was clear that Intel was going to put up a fight and resist as much as it could. It would make little sense for a m D to depend solely upon being a second source for Intel. Chips, particularly when Intel wasn't really interested in cooperating fully, and so A m D began work on designing its own x eight six based microprocessor, which would be released in n and it became known as the A m D K five. Well why was it called the K five? Well, by A m D s reckoning, it represented the fifth generation microprocessor family that A m D had built, the other four being second source Intel chips, but the K five was a totally new architecture that was based on the x A D six instruction set. So why the K Well, because K is also the letter that starts the word kryptonite, the substance that could bring down Superman. And I think we can all guess who was Superman in this particular scenario. A m D designed the K five entirely in house, and it was the first x A D six processor from A m D to have architecture designed by the A m D team itself, as opposed to either following Intel's detailed instructions to make a clone of their chips or through reverse engineering and existing Intel microchip. The K five copied some elements from the earlier A M twenty nine thousand microprocessor that was a risk or R I s C microchip the company made a few years earlier. I talked about that in the previous episode, and I think that was a pretty good choice. It gave them a starting point to work from, and they were able to really build on that and make a success out of it. The K five's design was a little bit complicated, and that placed limits on how much clock speed a m D could get out of it. But at the same time, the A m D engineers had made the operations really efficient, so while it might have a technically lower clock speed than a competing microprocessor, this increased efficiency helped balance things out so that at the end result it seemed like the K five was actually faster than its counterparts that technically had higher clock speeds. Yes, the other microprocessors could run more operations per second, but K five's efficiency was such that was able to make up for that lost ground. Now, when we come back, i'll talk more about a m d s experiences in the nineteen nineties and beyond, but first let's take a quick break. A m D would follow up the K five with a microprocessor called the now wait for it, the Case six, But the K six wasn't designed by a m D engineers, nor did it follow the K five architecture. Instead, A m D acquired another microchip manufacturing company called next Gen an e x G E N. Next Gen was getting ready to release a CPU it called the n X six eight six, but then A m D swooped in, bought up next Gen, and then repurpose the as yet unreleased n X six eight six to become the K six. A m D marketed it as an alternative for Intel's Pentium two processor, claiming that for less money you could get the same level of performance, and that was mostly true, though the Pentium two had some advantages over the Case six, namely a better math coprocessor or FPU. At this point, the K six and the variance I'll talk about in a second we're still compatible with Intel designed motherboards. The Case six was also cheaper than the pent Um two chips, and so the Case six became a popular choice for both O E M s and people building their own machines. A m D would follow up the Case six with the Case six two and the Case six three in nine. The Case six three paired two hundred fifty six L two cash memory on the CPU die in an effort to speed up processing and increasing the amount of data the CPU could access at any given time. The Case six too, was phenomenally successful, so much so that some analysts estimated that seventy percent of the under one thousand dollar PC market in nine had a m D K six two chips powering them. So, if you were building a computer on a budget and you wanted to get the most umph for your dollars, chances are you were going with a m D. The company would also release the Case six two plus in the Case six three plus in two thousands. These were microprocessors meant specifically for the mobile market, and they'd be the final entries in the Case six line of CPUs. Meanwhile, Jerry Sanders, whom you might remember from the first episode, he was the first president of a m D. He was a co founder and at this point was the CEO of the company, was riding high. He predicted astronomical share prices for the company in the near future. He continued the company's practice of building fabrication plants at a breakneck pace. He was building plants to manufacture microprocessors and semiconductor chips all over the world. A m D had been incredibly aggressive in building and staffing these fabrication facilities in order to meet the demand for microprocessors and actually to anticipate the next demand for them, and Sanders had adopted a reportedly lavish lifestyle, maintaining an off us in Beverly Hills, which is pretty darn far from Silicon Valley and the headquarters of a m D. I guess he never really gave up his dream of going into the recording industry, but a lavish lifestyle might be fine if things continued to go well for the company, and sadly that would not be the case. Sanders spending also seemed to trickle its way into the corporate culture of a m D overall, with executives and high ranking salesforce professionals spending greater amounts of money to curate an image of luxury and sophistication. Spending was getting out of hand, and a lot of that spending had to do with those fabrication facilities. According to Autika Raza, who had led next Gen before a m D had acquired that company and then later became the president and chief operating officer or CEO of a m D. Sanders was in a bad habit of building fabrication facilities too far in advance, at least according to Raza's analysis. His perspective, that is, Roza's perspective, was that the company should hold off building new facilities until the need was there. Sanders was building them ahead of the game, but that would mean that a m D was constantly raising money to build out the next facility in advance of any revenue it was generating, and if the industry were to ever dip, then it would leave a m D over extended. So Raza wanted to take a different route. He wanted to use revenues from current successes to fuel expansion on an as needed basis. In other words, you don't need to go out and build a new fabrication plant until the demand requires you to do it. Raza, who at one time had been viewed as a potential successor to Sanders, found himself in direct disagreement with the founder, and he would actually leave a m D in n reportedly after a massive falling out with Sanders, with whom he would never speak again. Now his successor was a guy named Hector Ruez, who had up to that time been heading up a division over at Motorola. Ruez was first wary of taking this job. It was more technically oriented industry than he had been used to, and he knew about Sanders and his reputation of alienating senior level staff. And he saw that there had been a string of chief operating officers, several of whom were rumored to be groomed as the heir apparent to a m D who had subsequently left the company. But he figured that Sanders might have issues relinquishing control to others, that this could cause issues, but Sanders was still a very impressive person. A m D was an impressive company, so Hector decided to take the job. Then Jerry Sanders would retire in the early two thousand's and Ruez would take over the company, and he began to clean house. He got rid of several top executives who had been around for quite some time in the Sanders era, and he started bring in new people, new talent. So Ruiz also saw that the market was changing, and while a m D was being innovative in CPUs and other microchips meant for personal computers, it was really making most of its profits from selling flash memory not CPUs, and so he started to refocus the company to that endeavor, but he also found that a m D was holding an odd place in the market. Ruez would write a book about his experiences, stating that Sanders had created this sort of weird paradox in a m D because Sanders had a real can do attitude, a a never say die approach to business. But at the same time, no one in the company ever seemed convinced that a m D could really go toe to toe with Intel, that a m D would always be a tiny company compared to Intel, that could never really take over as the leading microchip manufacturer in the industry. That that was just sort of this underlineing philosophy at a m D. And as possibly because a m D had built its business largely on being a second source chip company. So Rule has tried to change things, directing a m d s efforts at not just flash memory, but also developing premium processors for stuff like Internet servers, which were just starting to become a serious thing at the time. Now, around that same time, a m D and Intel faced off again in courtrooms. This time it was in the European Union. A m D complained to the European Commission that Intel was engaging in anti competitive behavior, violating the law, primarily through what am D described as abusive marketing campaigns. A m D even tried to use legal means to secure documents from a separate case against Intel. This one was brought against Intel by a company called Intergraph. But then the Intergraph case eventually settled out of court and things were obviously still very choppy between a m D and Intel, despite the fact that they still had this cross licensing agreement. The next chip from a m D, the Case seven, better known as the Athlon processor, changed things up again. Now the details get pretty technical, but an easy thing to understand is that the company was able to push clock rates up to one giga hurts. A m D also began to manufacture its own motherboards, anticipating that the day might come when compatibility with Intel's motherboards would come to an end. So, hey, what the heck is a motherboard? I mentioned it a couple of times in this episode. A motherboard is just a printed circuit board. It's sort of the highway system for information inside a computer. The motherboard typically has connectors into which you can plug other circuits like a CPU as a circuit, so you can plug a CPU into a motherboard or a GPU a graphics processing unit. The motherboard provides the physical connections between all these different components so that these circuits can send proper command ends to the right places. Now, not all CPUs or GPUs for that matter, are compatible with all motherboards. Motherboards can accept certain types of CPUs and not others, and that's one of the reasons it's really important to research first before you set out to build your first computer. It's entirely possible to pick up sweet components that look great on paper but ultimately won't work together because they're incompatible. So a m D set out to build its own computer platform. But in this case, Intel was able to outperform a m D. While a m d S processors were blazing, the motherboard chip set as a whole wasn't quite able to match Intel's four four zero b X component. Still, it showed that a m D was going to push hard to compete with Intel. A m D also introduced a new line of chips designed for entry level machines. These were running on a similar architecture as the Athalon processors, but that will lower clock speed. They called the new line of processors DURAN, and they competed against Intel's Cellern line of processors meant for the same market. A m D upgraded the Athlon family steadily year over year with names like Thunderbird, Palomino, Thoroughbred, and Barton. With each chip, a m D built upon what it had learned from the previous generation. The components sizes got smaller, Thoroughbred and Barton were built using a one thirty nanometer process and the clock speeds were climbing past two giga hurts. A m D was optimizing the architecture for memory access. Things were going pretty smoothly, and then a m D dropped a bombshell. The company that had built a business out of being a second source chip manufacturer actually beat Intel to the punch by releasing the first consumer oriented sixty four bit x eight six processor, the Athalon sixty four. Now, I've been explaining a lot of basic computer concepts here, so why not include sixty four bit? Ver is thirty two bit? So the consumer focused processors up to that point where thirty two bit processors. That means the processors were able to work with data units that were thirty two bits wide. Now, remember a bit is a single unit of information. It can be either a zero or a one. Eight bits is a byte or an octet, and thirty two bits would be four octets wide. A thirty two bit system can handle a range of two to the thirty second power number of values. So if we want to describe all the values that a thirty two bit number can describe, and we start with the number zero, we would go all the way up to four billion, two hundred ninety four million, nine hundred sixty seven thousand, two hundred nine five. That's the range of values a thirty two bit system can handle. Now, as the name implies, a sixty four bit system can handle a data width of sixty four bits, And you might be tempted to think that that means it can handle twice as much data as a thirty two bit system, but that's not how binary works. A sixty four bit system can handle a value range of two to the sixty four power of values, which is more than eighteen quintillion values. That is a very big number, much much bigger than the eight and a half billion or so that would be twice the thirty two bit range values, so you're not talking about doubling, you're talking much much larger than that. So a sixty four bit system can perform many more calculations per second. It can also support more RAM. A thirty two bit system maxes out at four gigabytes of RAM, or two to the thirty second power bytes of memory. A sixty four bit system would max out at least in theory at eighteen XO bytes of RAM, which I can't describe as anything other than a crap ton of random access memory. But six four bit CPUs can't quite reach that theoretical limit, and they max out in the terrabyte scale, not the exo byte scale. Still, that's a lot more memory than thirty two bit systems can handle. Now, sixty four bit systems had been around since the nineteen sixties, but had only seen use in academic settings and internally in various companies. No one had yet made a sixty four bit processor for the general public before A. M D and Microsoft released a sixty four bit version of Windows that such processors could leverage. And just to be clear, a thirty two bit system can't run sixty four bit software, but most sixty four bit systems can run either a thirty two bit or a sixty four bit version of operating systems. Now, I've got some more to say about what a m D has been up to, but first let's take another quick break. Am D, for the first time, had been the first to market with a microchip innovation. This led to Intel licensing the sixty four bit instruction set from a m D. Ah how the tables have turned Now, Intel, so used to being the entity to define standards was instead having to follow the lead of the upstart company. No never mind that both Intel and am D had been around since the late nineteen sixties, and a m D was really just a year younger than Intel was. I can only imagine things were tense in some of those meetings over at Intel headquarters, and a m D wasn't done knocking the socks off computer nerds like me. In two thousand five, the company released the athlont X two micro processor, which was the first x a D six dual core processor. Now, these days, multi core processors are the norm for many computer systems and even handheld devices, but this was brand new for the consumer market back in two thousand five, So what the heck is a dual core or multi core proces sessor. Now, I always like to use the analogy of a math class that has one superstar pupil and then a bunch of smart math students who don't quite measure up to superstar status. The superstar pupil represents a single core CPU that is significantly powerful. The smart math students represent a multi core processor. Each individual core of this multi core processor is less powerful than the super strong single CPU, but collectively those students can tackle some problems and solve them faster than the superstar. And we refer to those types of problems as being parallel problems, and that the cores are all executing operations in parallel with each other rather than in sequence. So here's the example. A math teacher hands out a pop quiz. The superstar has to answer eight questions on the quiz, all eight. The smart math students, of which there are eight, must each answer just one of those questions. So students one gets questioned one, student two gets questioned two, and so on. So who finishes first? Now, while the superstar might get through a couple of problems before any of the classmates have finished his or her individual problem, Ultimately, the class is going to finish First, they solved the test in parallel, each taking one part of the problem. So even though the superstar is technically better at math than they are, they can't answer those questions in sequence as quickly as the group can in parallel. Now, it's important to note that not all computational problems are parallel in nature, So for those problems, a really powerful single core processor is going to do better than the multi core approach, and a m D s early dual core processor couldn't work on the same thread at all, but one core could work on a thread of operations while the other core worked on unrelated computational problems, and that sped things up. Overall, both the sixty four bit consumer processor and the dual core innovation were phenomenal achievements in the world of consumer computers. A m D will never quite catching up to Intel's marketing with the whole Intel inside thing, was proving itself to be a capable and competitive player in the space, at least on a technological level. Business Wise, things were a bit less peppy. A m D was producing more chips than it could sell, and that was probably part of that whole crazy fabrication plant strategy Sanders had pursued in the nineties. They were literally making more chips than they had orders for. In two thousand one, a m D posted a net loss of sixty one million dollars, but the following year it was incredible. It was a loss of one point three billion dollars. In two thousand three it was another two seventy four million dollar loss. This is not a trend you want to see, Tenue. Now, while the company was introducing innovations, it was still battling its nemesis, Intel in the courtrooms. A m D brought another anti competitive suit against Intel in two thousand four two thousand five, this time in the United States. The complaint was forty eight pages long and accused Intel of using a monopolistic approach to strong armed companies to work with Intel rather than with a m D. At this point, a m D had several lawsuits against Intel pending in various courts, and in two thousand nine, Intel bargained a settlement agreement with a m D. Intel executives promised that their company would abide by a list of rules to avoid anti competitive practices. Now, according to c NET, The settlement included a payout to a m D to the tune of one point to five billion dollars wolf That certainly can help in an era where the company is losing money through sales. Intel also would introduce its famous tick talk Strata G, in which the company would first design a new microchip architecture, typically by reducing the size of the individual components from the previous generation's architecture and then cramming more components onto a single chips So, in other words, you say, let's take the design from the last generation of microchips, make everything smaller, add more to it, and release that. Then they would follow this up with the talk part of the cycle. They would dedicate research and development to find out how to best optimize the new smaller components to create a new architecture that makes the best use out of that. So the tick is the new architecture or the new the smaller components, and the talk was the new optimization of that. Each generation of chips represented either a take or a talk. This helped reduce risk and expenses on Intel's research and development and helped the company mount a counter attack against a m D. A m D got aggressive in the wake of their innovation. In two thousand six, the company acquired a graphics card company called A t I Technologies Incorporated for more than five billion dollars. A t I had launched in the mid eighties in Canada and had become known for their graphics processing units, and for a while a m D would market graphics processing cards under the A t I brand name. In fact, in many ways, a TI continued to perform as if it were a subsidiary company and not a true part of a m D, something that in hindsight, critics have suggested was a problem. According to an Ours Technica article that was titled up the Rise and Fall of a m D. Highly recommend you read that, by the way, it's a two part article, and it's fantastic. People within the company tended to gravitate toward either the CPU side of the business or the GPU side of the business, and both sides were competing over the same set of resources. Now, competition within a single company isn't always a great thing, and it led to tension within a m D. As well's delays in product development. A m d S CPU quality was starting to slide as well. The Optron processor called Barcelona didn't ship on time, and when it did finally come out, it had a bug in the design that, when fixed, slowed the chips performance speed by about ten percent. A few years later, the Bulldozer processor had similar issues. In retrospect, some engineers fault the acquisition for dividing the focus of the company and the lack of an overall roadmap for being the reason that the company was reeling a little bit. Meanwhile, PC sales in general were slowing down as the world began to shift more toward mobile computing. A m D found itself in choppy waters again. Ru has managed to take care of one big problem, the fabrication facilities that were making far too many chips for a m D to sell. He arranged a deal with a group of investors from Abu Dhabi to sell off a m D s fabrication plants. The idea was that m D would negotiate production contracts with this new company, and that new company could also accept fabrication contracts from other manufacturers, since the production capacity for all the fabrication plants exceeded what am D needed. Not long after that, Ruez would step down as CEO. Dirk Meyer, who had worked on the design of a m D s K seven chip, became the new CEO. Alan Remember when I said A m D and Intel settled that lawsuit in two thousand nine. One reason a m D might have agreed to come to the table with a settlement was that Intel lawyers were claiming the agreement between a m D and Intel to cross license the X eight six instruction set was only valid if a m D was both the designer and the fabricator of the chips. But now am D was outsourcing fabrication and that, according to Intel's lawyers, was in violation of the agreement. So it's possible a m D came to the table to negotiate a settlement in order to avoid a judgment on that point. Meyer would serve as CEO from two thousand eight to two thousand eleven. He was effectively removed from the position by the A m D board analysts at the time, We're a bit surprised. Meyer had been focusing on the traditional CPU market and making a MD competitive there, with plans to address the mobile market a little bit later further down the road. He wanted to get the CPU thing right first and then switch over to mobile. Now, it's possible that the board objected to that strategy and wanted someone who would lead the company to compete in the mobile space more aggressively, as that was the perceived area for growth. This was an era where it became clear that mobile was going to be the future of computers. After a CEO search, Rory Reid was selected to lead the company. Read diversified a m d S approach beyond the PC market, and Read was able to guide the company into entering new markets while lowering operating costs. In two thousand fourteen, he would step down as CEO. He said that that was the plan the whole time, that he was there just as sort of an interim CEO to make some business level changes to a m D and get the company on the right track. But he didn't have a deep background in engineering. A m d's next and current CEO did, and that is Lisa Sue. Since the nineteen nineties, Lisa Sue has worked in the semiconductor industry. She started over at Texas Instruments on the technical staff. She's also worked at IBM and Free Scale Semiconductor. Before she joined a m D. She served as the chief operating officer before being named the new president and CEO of the company, and under her leadership, a m D has done rather well. In two thousand seventeen, the company had a revenue of five point three three billion dollars. That was a growth over the previous year. Also, and remarkably, seventeen would be the first year that a m D would post a full year of profitability, meaning there were no quarters where they post in a loss. While the company would come out profitable in previous years, it always had quarters that had a loss in those years, so things really had changed. Not just a few years ago, lots of people were ready to write off a m D. The company was posting massive losses and it cut back jobs. It looked like it over extended itself. It looked like it was just not going to measure up against the competition, and the product quality appeared to be slipping. But more recently things have seemed to turn around, and perhaps we've yet to see the greatest achievements from a company that was able to shock the world by beating Intel to the punch. Who knows what they might do next. When that wraps up these episodes about the history of a m D. Thanks again, Stephen for sending in that request. I greatly appreciate it. I hope you guys enjoyed learning more about this semiconductor and microprocessor company. They are fascinating. They continue to be fascinating. So uh, that's that for that story. If you guys have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's a company, a technology, maybe a personality in tech, whatever it may be, why not send me an email about it. The addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com. 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