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.
3
HISTORY OF AMD
PRIVATE “TYPE=PICT;ALT=Jerry Sanders and Rich Previte” 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.
4
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.
AMD became a leader in investment into research and development. By the
end offiscal year 1981, the company had more than doubled its sales over
1979. Plants and facilities expanded with an emphasis on building in
Texas. New production facilities were built in San Antonio, and more fab
space was added to Austin as well. AMD had quickly become a major
contender in the world semiconductor marketplace.
1984-1989 – Weathering Hard Times
AMD celebrated its 15th year with one of the best sales years in company
history. In the months following AMD’s anniversary, employees received
record-setting profit sharing checks and celebrated Christmas with
musical group Chicago in San Francisco and Joe King Carrasco and the
Crowns in Texas.
By 1986, however, the tides of change had swept the industry. Japanese
semiconductor makers came to dominate the memory markets – up until now
a mainstay for AMD – and a fierce downturn had taken hold of the
computer market , limiting demand for chips in general. AMD, along with
the rest of the semiconductor industry, began looking for new ways to
compete in an increasingly difficult environment.
By 1989, Jerry Sanders was talking about transformation: changing the
entire company to compete in new markets. AMD began building its
submicron capability with the Submicron Development Center.
1989-94 – Making the Transformation
Finding new ways to compete led to the concept of AMD’s “Spheres of
Influence.” For the transforming AMD, those spheres were microprocessors
compatible with IBM computers, networking and communication chips,
programmable logic devices, and high-performance memories. In addition,
the company’s long survival depended on developing submicron process
technology that would fill its manufacturing needs into the next
century.
By its 25th anniversary, AMD had put to work every ounce of
tenaciousness it had to achieve those goals. Today, AMD is either #1 or
#2 worldwide in everymarket it serves, including the Microsoft®
Windows-compatible business, where the company has overcome legal
obstacles to produce its own versions of the wildly popular Am386® and
Am486® microprocessors. AMD has become a pre-eminent supplier of flash,
EPROM, networking,telecommunications and programmable logic chips as
well. And it is well on its way to bringing up another high-volume
production area devoted to submicron devices. For the past three years,
the company has enjoyed record sales and record operation income.
AMD looks very different today than it did 25 years ago. But it is still
the tough, determined competitor it always was, weathering every
challenge because of the unending strength of its people.
5
1994-1999 – From Transformation to Transcendence
AMD’s growth through the rest of the century will likely be fueled by
the exploding demand for mobile computing and telecommunications
devices, two markets for which AMD has spent years developing products.
Key to the company’s success will be building close relationships with
its customers, and continuing to develop the manufacturing and process
technologies necessary to produce future-generation submicron devices.
One thing is for certain, AMD’s future will be shaped by the same
principles that are woven into its past: a competitive drive, a focus on
customers, innovative new products, and the ability to learn and adapt
to change. Most of all, the company’s future will be shaped by AMDers,
the people whose efforts created a successful, and now legendary,
company.
6
AMD PROCESSORS
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.
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 Processor
As a member of AMD’s E86 family of x86-based processors , the AMD-K6
gives systems developers access to the largest base of programmers and
existing software while enabling powerful, cost-effective solutions for
today’s increasingly sophisticated embedded applications.
The AMD-K6 microprocessor has redefined the desktop PC market, providing
sixth-generation performance at an affordable price. Now, embedded
applications can benefit from the reliable, affordable computing power
derived from this powerful microprocessor. The AMD-K6 microprocessor
gives embedded customers a significant performance boost which enables
them to produce superior products.
For applications such as central office switches, point-of-sale
terminals, information appliances and Windows based single board
computers, the AMD-K6E microprocessor is an excellent choice for OEMs
looking to take advantage of the x86 instruction set. They can continue
to use the industry’s mostprevalent architecture to produce products
with high performance and fast time-to-market.
The AMD-K6-2 Processor
The AMD-K6-2 processor offers a powerful combination of system price and
performance and is the aleternative to Intel’s Pentium II processor.
The AMD-K6-2 processor with 3DNow! technology delivers leading-edge,
sixth-generation performance for today’s demanding Microsoft® Windows®
compatible homeand office applications. The 9.3-million-transistor
AMD-K6-2 processor is manufactured on AMD’s 0.25-micron,
five-layer-metal process technology.
The distinctive chracteristic of AMD-K6-2 processor is 3D Now!
technology.
3DNow! Technology
PRIVATE AMD’s 3DNow! technology is the first innovation to the x86
architecture that significantly enhances 3D graphics, multimedia, and
other floating-point-intensive PC applications to enable a superior
visual computing experience.
3DNow! technology is a set of 21 instructions that use SIMD (Single
Instruction Multiple Data) and other performance enhancements to open
the performance bottleneck in the 3D graphics pipeline between the host
CPU and the 3D graphics accelerator card.
3DNow! works hand-in-hand with leading 3D graphics accelerators to
achieve faster frame rates on high-resolution scenes, improved physical
modeling of real-world environments, realistic 3D graphics and images,
and theater-quality audio and video.
The AMD K6-III Processor
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.
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.
9
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.
10
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”
11
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
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