История AMD

Министерство  Образования
 Российской  Федерадии

Санкт-Петербургский Государственный Технический Университет

Факультет Экономики и Менеджмента

                                                                                 
Кафедра Иностранных Языков

РЕФЕРАТ

на тему

Advanced Micro Devices

Выполнил студент гр.3074/1

Кузьмин Павел Владимирович

Санкт-Петербург

1999

INTRODUCTION

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

The leading
position at the market  of   processors was taken by Intel and there were no
companies that could seriously compete with Intel. But the last 3 years it has
to share the market with another processors producer called AMD - Advanced
Micro Devices - the company  whose success is the point to be told about below.  

3

HISTORY OF AMD

As the AMD story has unfolded, its product lines
have expanded, its culture has evolved, and the individual successes of its
people have grown. Here's a brief summary of the three decades that have passed
- and a very favorable indication of the years that lie ahead.

Among the things that unite AMD
employees around the globe is a history highlighted by remarkable achievement.
Since 1969, AMD has grown from afledgling start-up, headquartered in the living
room of one of its founders, to a global corporation with annual revenues of  $2.4
billion. The events that shaped AMD's growth, the strengths that will drive its future success, and a timeline encompassing AMD's
defining moments are featured here.

1969-74 - Finding
Opportunity

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

Although the company was initially
headquartered in the living room of one of the co-founders, John Carey, it soon
moved to two rooms in the back of a rugcutting company in Santa Clara. By
September, AMD had raised the money it needed to begin manufacturing products
and moved into its first permanent home,901 Thompson Place in Sunnyvale.

During the company's first years,
the vast majority of its products were alternate-source devices, products
obtained from other companies that were then redesigned for greater speed and
efficiency. "Parametric superiority" were the watchwords of AMD even
then. To give the products even more of a selling edge, the company instituted
a guarantee of quality unprecedented in the industry - all products would be
made and tested to stringent MIL-STD-883,regardless of who the customer was and
at no extra cost.

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

1974-79 - Defining the
Future

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

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

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

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.

6

AMD
PROCESSORS

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

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

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

The Am5x86 Processor

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

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

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"html-net.dtd">

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.

7

The AMD-K6 Processor<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//SoftQuad//DTD HTML 3.2 + extensions for HoTMetaL PRO 3.0 19961211//EN" "hmpro3.dtd"> 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<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD
HTML//EN">

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

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

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

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

TriLevel
Cache Design

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

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

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

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

<!DOCTYPE HTML
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The
AMD-K7 Processor

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

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

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

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

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