Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios,
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works and I heart Radio and I love
Speaker 1: all things tech. And in our last episode, which was
Speaker 1: requested by listener Stephen, I left off with a m
Speaker 1: d's history in ninety six, when the company found itself
Speaker 1: reeling when Intel decided to cut ties. Up to that point,
Speaker 1: a m D had been in an agreement to act
Speaker 1: as a second source for Intel designed chips. Intel would
Speaker 1: get a licensing fee and a m D would be
Speaker 1: able to manufacture chips based on Intel's designs. But when
Speaker 1: a m D chips started to do better in performance
Speaker 1: tests than the Intel originals, things changed. Until ended a
Speaker 1: ten year agreement several years early, and the two companies
Speaker 1: would enter into a lengthy court battle that would ultimately
Speaker 1: go all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court.
Speaker 1: But we've got a few years to get through before
Speaker 1: we get to that. So Intel had introduced the eighty
Speaker 1: three eighty six microprocessor in nineteen eighty five, a year
Speaker 1: before it severed the agreement with a m D. The
Speaker 1: three eight six, as it was known, was a thirty
Speaker 1: two bit micro processor. It could run most older code
Speaker 1: designed for its predecessors, and was capable of faster clock rates,
Speaker 1: meaning it could run more operations per second, and it
Speaker 1: had a greater data bandwidth, which means it could run
Speaker 1: operations on larger amounts of information than the earlier chips could.
Speaker 1: Intel an a m D had set the stage for
Speaker 1: creating the standard in computer processing, and now Intel was
Speaker 1: determined to stand alone. A m D, for its part,
Speaker 1: have been designing its own version of the three eight six,
Speaker 1: called the get Ready for It a M three eight six,
Speaker 1: but Intel's decision to end the agreement through things into disarray.
Speaker 1: Intel argued that their agreement with a m D only
Speaker 1: covered the eight eighty six through the e D two
Speaker 1: eighty six family of micro processors, and that the three
Speaker 1: eight six and later iterations were excluded. A and D
Speaker 1: obviously disagreed with this interpretation of their agreement, claiming that
Speaker 1: all x eighty six derivatives were covered under this ten
Speaker 1: year plan that they had struck with Intel back in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty two. At this same time, things were shifting
Speaker 1: in the PC market. You might remember from my episode
Speaker 1: about early computer systems that there used to be a
Speaker 1: ton of different types of PCs on the market in
Speaker 1: the late seventies and early eighties, each with its own
Speaker 1: hardware and operating system. The ones we think about today
Speaker 1: are Windows based machines and Mac computers as far as
Speaker 1: personal machines are concerned. But up through the early nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: the field was much more crowded. You had companies like Tandy, Commodore,
Speaker 1: and Amiga and others competing with Apple and IBM. However,
Speaker 1: by the mid nineteen eighties the field had thinned out significantly.
Speaker 1: IBM had secured valuable deals with corporations, becoming known as
Speaker 1: the computer of choice for office workstations. Apple maintained a
Speaker 1: more niche market of users interested in the creative power
Speaker 1: of the Macintosh. Everyone else sort of began to fade away,
Speaker 1: and this left the IBM PC and it's compatible clones
Speaker 1: with the lion's share of the market. In fact, by
Speaker 1: the time Intel was trying to block a m D,
Speaker 1: the IBM PC market share had grown to about eighty
Speaker 1: four percent of all personal computers, so this was a
Speaker 1: really big deal. A m D had helped cement the
Speaker 1: X eight six chip as the go to microprocessor for computers,
Speaker 1: and now it looks like Intel was going to run
Speaker 1: away with the whole thing. Things were starting to smell
Speaker 1: a little anti competitive. Am D did still have an
Speaker 1: agreement to the underlying instruction set for the X eight
Speaker 1: six family of processors, so in some respects a m
Speaker 1: D was still in the game, but Intel wasn't going
Speaker 1: to share the actual physical design of the three six
Speaker 1: microprocessor with a m D. So the engineers at a
Speaker 1: m D set out to reverse engineer the three six
Speaker 1: and build their own version of it while the legal
Speaker 1: battle continued in the courts. Reverse engineering alone is a
Speaker 1: pretty fascinating subject. The basic concept is fairly intuitive. You
Speaker 1: take a technology and you examine it closely and you
Speaker 1: figure out what makes it tick, how does the tech
Speaker 1: actually do whatever it does. Then you go back and
Speaker 1: you build your own version of that technology based upon
Speaker 1: your understanding of how the starting example worked. So you're
Speaker 1: not starting off with some sort of blueprint or set
Speaker 1: of plans or instructions. You're sussing it out on your
Speaker 1: own based on existing instances of the technology. So it's
Speaker 1: a bit like detective work. Between reverse engineering and the
Speaker 1: legal battles. It would be years before a m D
Speaker 1: could bring its own three eight six chips to market.
Speaker 1: The company began releasing its version starting in nineteen, and
Speaker 1: once again a m D S version of Intel's chips
Speaker 1: were clocking in at a faster clock rate than the competition.
Speaker 1: Intel's three eight six chips maxed out at thirty three
Speaker 1: mega hurts, whereas a m D S could hit forty
Speaker 1: mega hurts. The legal battles continued, and a m D
Speaker 1: began to invest in designing its own microcode for chips.
Speaker 1: Intel's next microprocessor was predictably the eight four eight six,
Speaker 1: and a m D created its own version the A
Speaker 1: M four eight six. Some A M for eight six
Speaker 1: chips had Intel microcode from the x A D six
Speaker 1: agreement and others had a m D microcode, making it
Speaker 1: a little confusing, and all of them were outpacing Intel's
Speaker 1: version of the same chip. Even the top of the
Speaker 1: line microprocessor in Intel's forty six line was left behind.
Speaker 1: The fastest four D six from Intel had the top
Speaker 1: clock speed of one hundred mega hurts. A m D
Speaker 1: S version was able to reach speeds of one D
Speaker 1: twenty mega hurts. Now this was in When that legal
Speaker 1: battle I talked about finally concluded, the courts found in
Speaker 1: favor of A m D, granting the company some royalty
Speaker 1: free use of some of Intel's patents and awarding A
Speaker 1: m D millions of dollars in the process. But the
Speaker 1: whole endeavor had taught the engineers at A m D
Speaker 1: a valuable lesson. While they had won this battle, there
Speaker 1: was no guarantee that things would remain stable between Intel
Speaker 1: and a m D, so the company did release another
Speaker 1: x E D six derived chip. This one was called
Speaker 1: the A m D five x eight six, or five
Speaker 1: by eighty six if you wanted to think of it
Speaker 1: that way. And you may be thinking, ha, I never
Speaker 1: heard of a five eight six computer. I'm pretty sure
Speaker 1: that Intel switched over from four A D six to pentium,
Speaker 1: and you would be right. The A m D five
Speaker 1: x eight six chip was based off the same architecture
Speaker 1: as the A M four eight six microprocessor, but it
Speaker 1: did manage an even faster clock speed out of the box.
Speaker 1: It was a hundred thirty Mega hurts, but original equipment
Speaker 1: manufacturers or o e m s in the biz could
Speaker 1: get an even faster version than maxed out at a
Speaker 1: hundred fifty Mega hurts now according to Tom's Hardware, a website,
Speaker 1: which is, by the way, a great resource if you
Speaker 1: ever want to learn everything there is to know about
Speaker 1: just about any computer component you can think of. The
Speaker 1: A M four, A D six, and the five X
Speaker 1: eighty six processors also moved the floating point unit or
Speaker 1: FPU over to the central processing unit or CPU itself.
Speaker 1: Up until then, it had been customary to have separate
Speaker 1: CPUs and FPUs that would connect to each other through
Speaker 1: the motherboard. So I guess it's time to give a
Speaker 1: quick explanation about what these things actually mean. The CPU,
Speaker 1: I'm sure you've all heard of, right, It's sort of
Speaker 1: the head manager of your computer. It executes basic instructions.
Speaker 1: In the event that the instructions require the use of
Speaker 1: a specialized chip like a graphics processing unit also known
Speaker 1: as a GPU, the CPU can delegate those tasks to
Speaker 1: the appropriate hardware. It's a high functioning component of a computer.
Speaker 1: We often refer to it as the brains of the computer,
Speaker 1: but really it's just calling the shots at the highest level.
Speaker 1: The floating point unit carries out instructions on what are
Speaker 1: called floating point numbers. A floating point number is a
Speaker 1: workaround for a particular problem, which is how a computer
Speaker 1: represents real numbers. The range of real numbers is infinite,
Speaker 1: but a computer can't handle that. A computer has a
Speaker 1: limited capacity, so programmers use floating point numbers, so called
Speaker 1: because the decimal point has no fixed number of digits
Speaker 1: that have to appear before or after it. This allows
Speaker 1: programmers to represent numbers separated by many orders of magnitude.
Speaker 1: You can have incredibly large numbers paired with incredibly small
Speaker 1: numbers using this approach. UH typically you would use a
Speaker 1: variant of scientific notation for those really big or really
Speaker 1: small numbers. However, this does mean that much of the
Speaker 1: work computers do happens as approximations rather than as precise calculations,
Speaker 1: and this introduces the possibility of error. The more you
Speaker 1: are approximating something, the less accurate or precise it's going
Speaker 1: to be, particularly as you perform more calculations based on
Speaker 1: previous approximations. As these approximations start to add up, you
Speaker 1: can potentially get further and further away from a correct
Speaker 1: or true answer. But never mind that that's a discussion
Speaker 1: for a different episode. Now, after the four a D six,
Speaker 1: Intel came out with the first Pentium processor. So why
Speaker 1: did Intel change things up? Why did Intel go from
Speaker 1: four D six to pentium? Because the Pentium still followed
Speaker 1: the x A D six architecture and instruction set and
Speaker 1: spoiler alert, so do today's computers. So why would Intel
Speaker 1: choose pentium instead of sticking with the naming convention it
Speaker 1: had created. Why wasn't it the five eight six? Well,
Speaker 1: the main reason was, as I'm sure many of you
Speaker 1: have guessed that companies like A m D were the
Speaker 1: cause of this. Intel decided because of a m D,
Speaker 1: Intel couldn't trademark a number. Intel couldn't have five eighty
Speaker 1: six trademarked. You can't just trademarket basic number like that.
Speaker 1: So if it had stuck with the numbering system, a
Speaker 1: m D could then come out with its A m
Speaker 1: D five a D six and with its reputation for
Speaker 1: outpacing Intel's comparable chips, that could hurt Intel's sales. But Pentium,
Speaker 1: that was different because Pentium was a name. You can
Speaker 1: trademark a name, and that's what Intel did. It trademarked
Speaker 1: the term pentium, which prevented a m D and other
Speaker 1: competitors from using that name on their own chips. So
Speaker 1: now it added a marketing concern for these competitors. How
Speaker 1: would they be able to market their own chips and
Speaker 1: compare them against Intel's chips without using a trademarked name
Speaker 1: that they did not have the rights to. It was
Speaker 1: kind of throwing a monkey wrench into things. Now. The
Speaker 1: way companies got around this was to include a number
Speaker 1: that they referred to as PR, which essentially stood for
Speaker 1: pentium rating. The number next to the PR designation would
Speaker 1: indicate the comparable pentium clock speed that the chip in
Speaker 1: question would be most like. So if you came out
Speaker 1: with a microchip and you gave it a PR rating
Speaker 1: of one hundred, what that tells the end consumer is
Speaker 1: that the chip you have put out is equivalent to
Speaker 1: an Intel pentium processor that has a clock speed of
Speaker 1: one mega hurts. So it's kind of a way of
Speaker 1: getting around the fact that they could not call their
Speaker 1: own chips their variance of the Pendium processor. Now it
Speaker 1: was clear that Intel was going to put up a
Speaker 1: fight and resist as much as it could. It would
Speaker 1: make little sense for a m D to depend solely
Speaker 1: upon being a second source for Intel. Chips, particularly when
Speaker 1: Intel wasn't really interested in cooperating fully, and so A
Speaker 1: m D began work on designing its own x eight
Speaker 1: six based microprocessor, which would be released in n and
Speaker 1: it became known as the A m D K five.
Speaker 1: Well why was it called the K five? Well, by
Speaker 1: A m D s reckoning, it represented the fifth generation
Speaker 1: microprocessor family that A m D had built, the other
Speaker 1: four being second source Intel chips, but the K five
Speaker 1: was a totally new architecture that was based on the
Speaker 1: x A D six instruction set. So why the K Well,
Speaker 1: because K is also the letter that starts the word kryptonite,
Speaker 1: the substance that could bring down Superman. And I think
Speaker 1: we can all guess who was Superman in this particular scenario.
Speaker 1: A m D designed the K five entirely in house,
Speaker 1: and it was the first x A D six processor
Speaker 1: from A m D to have architecture designed by the
Speaker 1: A m D team itself, as opposed to either following
Speaker 1: Intel's detailed instructions to make a clone of their chips
Speaker 1: or through reverse engineering and existing Intel microchip. The K
Speaker 1: five copied some elements from the earlier A M twenty
Speaker 1: nine thousand microprocessor that was a risk or R I
Speaker 1: s C microchip the company made a few years earlier.
Speaker 1: I talked about that in the previous episode, and I
Speaker 1: think that was a pretty good choice. It gave them
Speaker 1: a starting point to work from, and they were able
Speaker 1: to really build on that and make a success out
Speaker 1: of it. The K five's design was a little bit complicated,
Speaker 1: and that placed limits on how much clock speed a
Speaker 1: m D could get out of it. But at the
Speaker 1: same time, the A m D engineers had made the
Speaker 1: operations really efficient, so while it might have a technically
Speaker 1: lower clock speed than a competing microprocessor, this increased efficiency
Speaker 1: helped balance things out so that at the end result
Speaker 1: it seemed like the K five was actually faster than
Speaker 1: its counterparts that technically had higher clock speeds. Yes, the
Speaker 1: other microprocessors could run more operations per second, but K
Speaker 1: five's efficiency was such that was able to make up
Speaker 1: for that lost ground. Now, when we come back, i'll
Speaker 1: talk more about a m d s experiences in the
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties and beyond, but first let's take a quick break.
Speaker 1: A m D would follow up the K five with
Speaker 1: a microprocessor called the now wait for it, the Case six,
Speaker 1: But the K six wasn't designed by a m D engineers,
Speaker 1: nor did it follow the K five architecture. Instead, A
Speaker 1: m D acquired another microchip manufacturing company called next Gen
Speaker 1: an e x G E N. Next Gen was getting
Speaker 1: ready to release a CPU it called the n X
Speaker 1: six eight six, but then A m D swooped in,
Speaker 1: bought up next Gen, and then repurpose the as yet
Speaker 1: unreleased n X six eight six to become the K six.
Speaker 1: A m D marketed it as an alternative for Intel's
Speaker 1: Pentium two processor, claiming that for less money you could
Speaker 1: get the same level of performance, and that was mostly true,
Speaker 1: though the Pentium two had some advantages over the Case six,
Speaker 1: namely a better math coprocessor or FPU. At this point,
Speaker 1: the K six and the variance I'll talk about in
Speaker 1: a second we're still compatible with Intel designed motherboards. The
Speaker 1: Case six was also cheaper than the pent Um two chips,
Speaker 1: and so the Case six became a popular choice for
Speaker 1: both O E M s and people building their own machines.
Speaker 1: A m D would follow up the Case six with
Speaker 1: the Case six two and the Case six three in nine.
Speaker 1: The Case six three paired two hundred fifty six L
Speaker 1: two cash memory on the CPU die in an effort
Speaker 1: to speed up processing and increasing the amount of data
Speaker 1: the CPU could access at any given time. The Case
Speaker 1: six too, was phenomenally successful, so much so that some
Speaker 1: analysts estimated that seventy percent of the under one thousand
Speaker 1: dollar PC market in nine had a m D K
Speaker 1: six two chips powering them. So, if you were building
Speaker 1: a computer on a budget and you wanted to get
Speaker 1: the most umph for your dollars, chances are you were
Speaker 1: going with a m D. The company would also release
Speaker 1: the Case six two plus in the Case six three
Speaker 1: plus in two thousands. These were microprocessors meant specifically for
Speaker 1: the mobile market, and they'd be the final entries in
Speaker 1: the Case six line of CPUs. Meanwhile, Jerry Sanders, whom
Speaker 1: you might remember from the first episode, he was the
Speaker 1: first president of a m D. He was a co
Speaker 1: founder and at this point was the CEO of the company,
Speaker 1: was riding high. He predicted astronomical share prices for the
Speaker 1: company in the near future. He continued the company's practice
Speaker 1: of building fabrication plants at a breakneck pace. He was
Speaker 1: building plants to manufacture microprocessors and semiconductor chips all over
Speaker 1: the world. A m D had been incredibly aggressive in
Speaker 1: building and staffing these fabrication facilities in order to meet
Speaker 1: the demand for microprocessors and actually to anticipate the next
Speaker 1: demand for them, and Sanders had adopted a reportedly lavish lifestyle,
Speaker 1: maintaining an off us in Beverly Hills, which is pretty
Speaker 1: darn far from Silicon Valley and the headquarters of a
Speaker 1: m D. I guess he never really gave up his
Speaker 1: dream of going into the recording industry, but a lavish
Speaker 1: lifestyle might be fine if things continued to go well
Speaker 1: for the company, and sadly that would not be the case.
Speaker 1: Sanders spending also seemed to trickle its way into the
Speaker 1: corporate culture of a m D overall, with executives and
Speaker 1: high ranking salesforce professionals spending greater amounts of money to
Speaker 1: curate an image of luxury and sophistication. Spending was getting
Speaker 1: out of hand, and a lot of that spending had
Speaker 1: to do with those fabrication facilities. According to Autika Raza,
Speaker 1: who had led next Gen before a m D had
Speaker 1: acquired that company and then later became the president and
Speaker 1: chief operating officer or CEO of a m D. Sanders
Speaker 1: was in a bad habit of building fabrication facilities too
Speaker 1: far in advance, at least according to Raza's analysis. His perspective,
Speaker 1: that is, Roza's perspective, was that the company should hold
Speaker 1: off building new facilities until the need was there. Sanders
Speaker 1: was building them ahead of the game, but that would
Speaker 1: mean that a m D was constantly raising money to
Speaker 1: build out the next facility in advance of any revenue
Speaker 1: it was generating, and if the industry were to ever dip,
Speaker 1: then it would leave a m D over extended. So
Speaker 1: Raza wanted to take a different route. He wanted to
Speaker 1: use revenues from current successes to fuel expansion on an
Speaker 1: as needed basis. In other words, you don't need to
Speaker 1: go out and build a new fabrication plant until the
Speaker 1: demand requires you to do it. Raza, who at one
Speaker 1: time had been viewed as a potential successor to Sanders,
Speaker 1: found himself in direct disagreement with the founder, and he
Speaker 1: would actually leave a m D in n reportedly after
Speaker 1: a massive falling out with Sanders, with whom he would
Speaker 1: never speak again. Now his successor was a guy named
Speaker 1: Hector Ruez, who had up to that time been heading
Speaker 1: up a division over at Motorola. Ruez was first wary
Speaker 1: of taking this job. It was more technically oriented industry
Speaker 1: than he had been used to, and he knew about
Speaker 1: Sanders and his reputation of alienating senior level staff. And
Speaker 1: he saw that there had been a string of chief
Speaker 1: operating officers, several of whom were rumored to be groomed
Speaker 1: as the heir apparent to a m D who had
Speaker 1: subsequently left the company. But he figured that Sanders might
Speaker 1: have issues relinquishing control to others, that this could cause issues,
Speaker 1: but Sanders was still a very impressive person. A m
Speaker 1: D was an impressive company, so Hector decided to take
Speaker 1: the job. Then Jerry Sanders would retire in the early
Speaker 1: two thousand's and Ruez would take over the company, and
Speaker 1: he began to clean house. He got rid of several
Speaker 1: top executives who had been around for quite some time
Speaker 1: in the Sanders era, and he started bring in new people,
Speaker 1: new talent. So Ruiz also saw that the market was changing,
Speaker 1: and while a m D was being innovative in CPUs
Speaker 1: and other microchips meant for personal computers, it was really
Speaker 1: making most of its profits from selling flash memory not CPUs,
Speaker 1: and so he started to refocus the company to that endeavor,
Speaker 1: but he also found that a m D was holding
Speaker 1: an odd place in the market. Ruez would write a
Speaker 1: book about his experiences, stating that Sanders had created this
Speaker 1: sort of weird paradox in a m D because Sanders
Speaker 1: had a real can do attitude, a a never say
Speaker 1: die approach to business. But at the same time, no
Speaker 1: one in the company ever seemed convinced that a m
Speaker 1: D could really go toe to toe with Intel, that
Speaker 1: a m D would always be a tiny company compared
Speaker 1: to Intel, that could never really take over as the
Speaker 1: leading microchip manufacturer in the industry. That that was just
Speaker 1: sort of this underlineing philosophy at a m D. And
Speaker 1: as possibly because a m D had built its business
Speaker 1: largely on being a second source chip company. So Rule
Speaker 1: has tried to change things, directing a m d s
Speaker 1: efforts at not just flash memory, but also developing premium
Speaker 1: processors for stuff like Internet servers, which were just starting
Speaker 1: to become a serious thing at the time. Now, around
Speaker 1: that same time, a m D and Intel faced off
Speaker 1: again in courtrooms. This time it was in the European Union.
Speaker 1: A m D complained to the European Commission that Intel
Speaker 1: was engaging in anti competitive behavior, violating the law, primarily
Speaker 1: through what am D described as abusive marketing campaigns. A
Speaker 1: m D even tried to use legal means to secure
Speaker 1: documents from a separate case against Intel. This one was
Speaker 1: brought against Intel by a company called Intergraph. But then
Speaker 1: the Intergraph case eventually settled out of court and things
Speaker 1: were obviously still very choppy between a m D and Intel,
Speaker 1: despite the fact that they still had this cross licensing agreement.
Speaker 1: The next chip from a m D, the Case seven,
Speaker 1: better known as the Athlon processor, changed things up again.
Speaker 1: Now the details get pretty technical, but an easy thing
Speaker 1: to understand is that the company was able to push
Speaker 1: clock rates up to one giga hurts. A m D
Speaker 1: also began to manufacture its own motherboards, anticipating that the
Speaker 1: day might come when compatibility with Intel's motherboards would come
Speaker 1: to an end. So, hey, what the heck is a motherboard?
Speaker 1: I mentioned it a couple of times in this episode.
Speaker 1: A motherboard is just a printed circuit board. It's sort
Speaker 1: of the highway system for information inside a computer. The
Speaker 1: motherboard typically has connectors into which you can plug other
Speaker 1: circuits like a CPU as a circuit, so you can
Speaker 1: plug a CPU into a motherboard or a GPU a
Speaker 1: graphics processing unit. The motherboard provides the physical connections between
Speaker 1: all these different components so that these circuits can send
Speaker 1: proper command ends to the right places. Now, not all
Speaker 1: CPUs or GPUs for that matter, are compatible with all motherboards.
Speaker 1: Motherboards can accept certain types of CPUs and not others,
Speaker 1: and that's one of the reasons it's really important to
Speaker 1: research first before you set out to build your first computer.
Speaker 1: It's entirely possible to pick up sweet components that look
Speaker 1: great on paper but ultimately won't work together because they're incompatible.
Speaker 1: So a m D set out to build its own
Speaker 1: computer platform. But in this case, Intel was able to
Speaker 1: outperform a m D. While a m d S processors
Speaker 1: were blazing, the motherboard chip set as a whole wasn't
Speaker 1: quite able to match Intel's four four zero b X component. Still,
Speaker 1: it showed that a m D was going to push
Speaker 1: hard to compete with Intel. A m D also introduced
Speaker 1: a new line of chips designed for entry level machines.
Speaker 1: These were running on a similar architecture as the Athalon processors,
Speaker 1: but that will lower clock speed. They called the new
Speaker 1: line of processors DURAN, and they competed against Intel's Cellern
Speaker 1: line of processors meant for the same market. A m
Speaker 1: D upgraded the Athlon family steadily year over year with
Speaker 1: names like Thunderbird, Palomino, Thoroughbred, and Barton. With each chip,
Speaker 1: a m D built upon what it had learned from
Speaker 1: the previous generation. The components sizes got smaller, Thoroughbred and
Speaker 1: Barton were built using a one thirty nanometer process and
Speaker 1: the clock speeds were climbing past two giga hurts. A
Speaker 1: m D was optimizing the architecture for memory access. Things
Speaker 1: were going pretty smoothly, and then a m D dropped
Speaker 1: a bombshell. The company that had built a business out
Speaker 1: of being a second source chip manufacturer actually beat Intel
Speaker 1: to the punch by releasing the first consumer oriented sixty
Speaker 1: four bit x eight six processor, the Athalon sixty four. Now,
Speaker 1: I've been explaining a lot of basic computer concepts here,
Speaker 1: so why not include sixty four bit? Ver is thirty
Speaker 1: two bit? So the consumer focused processors up to that
Speaker 1: point where thirty two bit processors. That means the processors
Speaker 1: were able to work with data units that were thirty
Speaker 1: two bits wide. Now, remember a bit is a single
Speaker 1: unit of information. It can be either a zero or
Speaker 1: a one. Eight bits is a byte or an octet,
Speaker 1: and thirty two bits would be four octets wide. A
Speaker 1: thirty two bit system can handle a range of two
Speaker 1: to the thirty second power number of values. So if
Speaker 1: we want to describe all the values that a thirty
Speaker 1: two bit number can describe, and we start with the
Speaker 1: number zero, we would go all the way up to
Speaker 1: four billion, two hundred ninety four million, nine hundred sixty
Speaker 1: seven thousand, two hundred nine five. That's the range of
Speaker 1: values a thirty two bit system can handle. Now, as
Speaker 1: the name implies, a sixty four bit system can handle
Speaker 1: a data width of sixty four bits, And you might
Speaker 1: be tempted to think that that means it can handle
Speaker 1: twice as much data as a thirty two bit system,
Speaker 1: but that's not how binary works. A sixty four bit
Speaker 1: system can handle a value range of two to the
Speaker 1: sixty four power of values, which is more than eighteen
Speaker 1: quintillion values. That is a very big number, much much
Speaker 1: bigger than the eight and a half billion or so
Speaker 1: that would be twice the thirty two bit range values,
Speaker 1: so you're not talking about doubling, you're talking much much
Speaker 1: larger than that. So a sixty four bit system can
Speaker 1: perform many more calculations per second. It can also support
Speaker 1: more RAM. A thirty two bit system maxes out at
Speaker 1: four gigabytes of RAM, or two to the thirty second
Speaker 1: power bytes of memory. A sixty four bit system would
Speaker 1: max out at least in theory at eighteen XO bytes
Speaker 1: of RAM, which I can't describe as anything other than
Speaker 1: a crap ton of random access memory. But six four
Speaker 1: bit CPUs can't quite reach that theoretical limit, and they
Speaker 1: max out in the terrabyte scale, not the exo byte scale. Still,
Speaker 1: that's a lot more memory than thirty two bit systems
Speaker 1: can handle. Now, sixty four bit systems had been around
Speaker 1: since the nineteen sixties, but had only seen use in
Speaker 1: academic settings and internally in various companies. No one had
Speaker 1: yet made a sixty four bit processor for the general
Speaker 1: public before A. M D and Microsoft released a sixty
Speaker 1: four bit version of Windows that such processors could leverage.
Speaker 1: And just to be clear, a thirty two bit system
Speaker 1: can't run sixty four bit software, but most sixty four
Speaker 1: bit systems can run either a thirty two bit or
Speaker 1: a sixty four bit version of operating systems. Now, I've
Speaker 1: got some more to say about what a m D
Speaker 1: has been up to, but first let's take another quick break.
Speaker 1: Am D, for the first time, had been the first
Speaker 1: to market with a microchip innovation. This led to Intel
Speaker 1: licensing the sixty four bit instruction set from a m D.
Speaker 1: Ah how the tables have turned Now, Intel, so used
Speaker 1: to being the entity to define standards was instead having
Speaker 1: to follow the lead of the upstart company. No never
Speaker 1: mind that both Intel and am D had been around
Speaker 1: since the late nineteen sixties, and a m D was
Speaker 1: really just a year younger than Intel was. I can
Speaker 1: only imagine things were tense in some of those meetings
Speaker 1: over at Intel headquarters, and a m D wasn't done
Speaker 1: knocking the socks off computer nerds like me. In two
Speaker 1: thousand five, the company released the athlont X two micro processor,
Speaker 1: which was the first x a D six dual core processor. Now,
Speaker 1: these days, multi core processors are the norm for many
Speaker 1: computer systems and even handheld devices, but this was brand
Speaker 1: new for the consumer market back in two thousand five,
Speaker 1: So what the heck is a dual core or multi
Speaker 1: core proces sessor. Now, I always like to use the
Speaker 1: analogy of a math class that has one superstar pupil
Speaker 1: and then a bunch of smart math students who don't
Speaker 1: quite measure up to superstar status. The superstar pupil represents
Speaker 1: a single core CPU that is significantly powerful. The smart
Speaker 1: math students represent a multi core processor. Each individual core
Speaker 1: of this multi core processor is less powerful than the
Speaker 1: super strong single CPU, but collectively those students can tackle
Speaker 1: some problems and solve them faster than the superstar. And
Speaker 1: we refer to those types of problems as being parallel problems,
Speaker 1: and that the cores are all executing operations in parallel
Speaker 1: with each other rather than in sequence. So here's the example.
Speaker 1: A math teacher hands out a pop quiz. The superstar
Speaker 1: has to answer eight questions on the quiz, all eight.
Speaker 1: The smart math students, of which there are eight, must
Speaker 1: each answer just one of those questions. So students one
Speaker 1: gets questioned one, student two gets questioned two, and so on.
Speaker 1: So who finishes first? Now, while the superstar might get
Speaker 1: through a couple of problems before any of the classmates
Speaker 1: have finished his or her individual problem, Ultimately, the class
Speaker 1: is going to finish First, they solved the test in parallel,
Speaker 1: each taking one part of the problem. So even though
Speaker 1: the superstar is technically better at math than they are,
Speaker 1: they can't answer those questions in sequence as quickly as
Speaker 1: the group can in parallel. Now, it's important to note
Speaker 1: that not all computational problems are parallel in nature, So
Speaker 1: for those problems, a really powerful single core processor is
Speaker 1: going to do better than the multi core approach, and
Speaker 1: a m D s early dual core processor couldn't work
Speaker 1: on the same thread at all, but one core could
Speaker 1: work on a thread of operations while the other core
Speaker 1: worked on unrelated computational problems, and that sped things up. Overall,
Speaker 1: both the sixty four bit consumer processor and the dual
Speaker 1: core innovation were phenomenal achievements in the world of consumer computers.
Speaker 1: A m D will never quite catching up to Intel's
Speaker 1: marketing with the whole Intel inside thing, was proving itself
Speaker 1: to be a capable and competitive player in the space,
Speaker 1: at least on a technological level. Business Wise, things were
Speaker 1: a bit less peppy. A m D was producing more
Speaker 1: chips than it could sell, and that was probably part
Speaker 1: of that whole crazy fabrication plant strategy Sanders had pursued
Speaker 1: in the nineties. They were literally making more chips than
Speaker 1: they had orders for. In two thousand one, a m
Speaker 1: D posted a net loss of sixty one million dollars,
Speaker 1: but the following year it was incredible. It was a
Speaker 1: loss of one point three billion dollars. In two thousand
Speaker 1: three it was another two seventy four million dollar loss.
Speaker 1: This is not a trend you want to see, Tenue. Now,
Speaker 1: while the company was introducing innovations, it was still battling
Speaker 1: its nemesis, Intel in the courtrooms. A m D brought
Speaker 1: another anti competitive suit against Intel in two thousand four
Speaker 1: two thousand five, this time in the United States. The
Speaker 1: complaint was forty eight pages long and accused Intel of
Speaker 1: using a monopolistic approach to strong armed companies to work
Speaker 1: with Intel rather than with a m D. At this point,
Speaker 1: a m D had several lawsuits against Intel pending in
Speaker 1: various courts, and in two thousand nine, Intel bargained a
Speaker 1: settlement agreement with a m D. Intel executives promised that
Speaker 1: their company would abide by a list of rules to
Speaker 1: avoid anti competitive practices. Now, according to c NET, The
Speaker 1: settlement included a payout to a m D to the
Speaker 1: tune of one point to five billion dollars wolf That
Speaker 1: certainly can help in an era where the company is
Speaker 1: losing money through sales. Intel also would introduce its famous
Speaker 1: tick talk Strata G, in which the company would first
Speaker 1: design a new microchip architecture, typically by reducing the size
Speaker 1: of the individual components from the previous generation's architecture and
Speaker 1: then cramming more components onto a single chips So, in
Speaker 1: other words, you say, let's take the design from the
Speaker 1: last generation of microchips, make everything smaller, add more to it,
Speaker 1: and release that. Then they would follow this up with
Speaker 1: the talk part of the cycle. They would dedicate research
Speaker 1: and development to find out how to best optimize the
Speaker 1: new smaller components to create a new architecture that makes
Speaker 1: the best use out of that. So the tick is
Speaker 1: the new architecture or the new the smaller components, and
Speaker 1: the talk was the new optimization of that. Each generation
Speaker 1: of chips represented either a take or a talk. This
Speaker 1: helped reduce risk and expenses on Intel's research and development
Speaker 1: and helped the company mount a counter attack against a
Speaker 1: m D. A m D got aggressive in the wake
Speaker 1: of their innovation. In two thousand six, the company acquired
Speaker 1: a graphics card company called A t I Technologies Incorporated
Speaker 1: for more than five billion dollars. A t I had
Speaker 1: launched in the mid eighties in Canada and had become
Speaker 1: known for their graphics processing units, and for a while
Speaker 1: a m D would market graphics processing cards under the
Speaker 1: A t I brand name. In fact, in many ways,
Speaker 1: a TI continued to perform as if it were a
Speaker 1: subsidiary company and not a true part of a m D,
Speaker 1: something that in hindsight, critics have suggested was a problem.
Speaker 1: According to an Ours Technica article that was titled up
Speaker 1: the Rise and Fall of a m D. Highly recommend
Speaker 1: you read that, by the way, it's a two part article,
Speaker 1: and it's fantastic. People within the company tended to gravitate
Speaker 1: toward either the CPU side of the business or the
Speaker 1: GPU side of the business, and both sides were competing
Speaker 1: over the same set of resources. Now, competition within a
Speaker 1: single company isn't always a great thing, and it led
Speaker 1: to tension within a m D. As well's delays in
Speaker 1: product development. A m d S CPU quality was starting
Speaker 1: to slide as well. The Optron processor called Barcelona didn't
Speaker 1: ship on time, and when it did finally come out,
Speaker 1: it had a bug in the design that, when fixed,
Speaker 1: slowed the chips performance speed by about ten percent. A
Speaker 1: few years later, the Bulldozer processor had similar issues. In retrospect,
Speaker 1: some engineers fault the acquisition for dividing the focus of
Speaker 1: the company and the lack of an overall roadmap for
Speaker 1: being the reason that the company was reeling a little bit. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: PC sales in general were slowing down as the world
Speaker 1: began to shift more toward mobile computing. A m D
Speaker 1: found itself in choppy waters again. Ru has managed to
Speaker 1: take care of one big problem, the fabrication facilities that
Speaker 1: were making far too many chips for a m D
Speaker 1: to sell. He arranged a deal with a group of
Speaker 1: investors from Abu Dhabi to sell off a m D
Speaker 1: s fabrication plants. The idea was that m D would
Speaker 1: negotiate production contracts with this new company, and that new
Speaker 1: company could also accept fabrication contracts from other manufacturers, since
Speaker 1: the production capacity for all the fabrication plants exceeded what
Speaker 1: am D needed. Not long after that, Ruez would step
Speaker 1: down as CEO. Dirk Meyer, who had worked on the
Speaker 1: design of a m D s K seven chip, became
Speaker 1: the new CEO. Alan Remember when I said A m
Speaker 1: D and Intel settled that lawsuit in two thousand nine.
Speaker 1: One reason a m D might have agreed to come
Speaker 1: to the table with a settlement was that Intel lawyers
Speaker 1: were claiming the agreement between a m D and Intel
Speaker 1: to cross license the X eight six instruction set was
Speaker 1: only valid if a m D was both the designer
Speaker 1: and the fabricator of the chips. But now am D
Speaker 1: was outsourcing fabrication and that, according to Intel's lawyers, was
Speaker 1: in violation of the agreement. So it's possible a m
Speaker 1: D came to the table to negotiate a settlement in
Speaker 1: order to avoid a judgment on that point. Meyer would
Speaker 1: serve as CEO from two thousand eight to two thousand eleven.
Speaker 1: He was effectively removed from the position by the A
Speaker 1: m D board analysts at the time, We're a bit surprised.
Speaker 1: Meyer had been focusing on the traditional CPU market and
Speaker 1: making a MD competitive there, with plans to address the
Speaker 1: mobile market a little bit later further down the road.
Speaker 1: He wanted to get the CPU thing right first and
Speaker 1: then switch over to mobile. Now, it's possible that the
Speaker 1: board objected to that strategy and wanted someone who would
Speaker 1: lead the company to compete in the mobile space more aggressively,
Speaker 1: as that was the perceived area for growth. This was
Speaker 1: an era where it became clear that mobile was going
Speaker 1: to be the future of computers. After a CEO search,
Speaker 1: Rory Reid was selected to lead the company. Read diversified
Speaker 1: a m d S approach beyond the PC market, and
Speaker 1: Read was able to guide the company into entering new
Speaker 1: markets while lowering operating costs. In two thousand fourteen, he
Speaker 1: would step down as CEO. He said that that was
Speaker 1: the plan the whole time, that he was there just
Speaker 1: as sort of an interim CEO to make some business
Speaker 1: level changes to a m D and get the company
Speaker 1: on the right track. But he didn't have a deep
Speaker 1: background in engineering. A m d's next and current CEO did,
Speaker 1: and that is Lisa Sue. Since the nineteen nineties, Lisa
Speaker 1: Sue has worked in the semiconductor industry. She started over
Speaker 1: at Texas Instruments on the technical staff. She's also worked
Speaker 1: at IBM and Free Scale Semiconductor. Before she joined a
Speaker 1: m D. She served as the chief operating officer before
Speaker 1: being named the new president and CEO of the company,
Speaker 1: and under her leadership, a m D has done rather well.
Speaker 1: In two thousand seventeen, the company had a revenue of
Speaker 1: five point three three billion dollars. That was a growth
Speaker 1: over the previous year. Also, and remarkably, seventeen would be
Speaker 1: the first year that a m D would post a
Speaker 1: full year of profitability, meaning there were no quarters where
Speaker 1: they post in a loss. While the company would come
Speaker 1: out profitable in previous years, it always had quarters that
Speaker 1: had a loss in those years, so things really had changed.
Speaker 1: Not just a few years ago, lots of people were
Speaker 1: ready to write off a m D. The company was
Speaker 1: posting massive losses and it cut back jobs. It looked
Speaker 1: like it over extended itself. It looked like it was
Speaker 1: just not going to measure up against the competition, and
Speaker 1: the product quality appeared to be slipping. But more recently
Speaker 1: things have seemed to turn around, and perhaps we've yet
Speaker 1: to see the greatest achievements from a company that was
Speaker 1: able to shock the world by beating Intel to the punch.
Speaker 1: Who knows what they might do next. When that wraps
Speaker 1: up these episodes about the history of a m D.
Speaker 1: Thanks again, Stephen for sending in that request. I greatly
Speaker 1: appreciate it. I hope you guys enjoyed learning more about
Speaker 1: this semiconductor and microprocessor company. They are fascinating. They continue
Speaker 1: to be fascinating. So uh, that's that for that story.
Speaker 1: If you guys have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff,
Speaker 1: whether it's a company, a technology, maybe a personality in tech,
Speaker 1: whatever it may be, why not send me an email
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