WEBVTT - The Early Days of AMD 0:00:04.240 --> 0:00:07.240 Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios 0:00:07.320 --> 0:00:14.040 How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. 0:00:14.240 --> 0:00:17.880 I am your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer 0:00:17.920 --> 0:00:19.720 with How Stuff Works and I heart radio and I 0:00:19.800 --> 0:00:24.000 love all things tech and tech Stuff. Listener Stephen asked 0:00:24.000 --> 0:00:27.400 me a long time ago if I could do an 0:00:27.400 --> 0:00:31.000 episode or two about the company A m D. And 0:00:31.040 --> 0:00:33.320 it's been a long time, Stephen, but now I'm getting 0:00:33.360 --> 0:00:35.960 to that episode. So today we're going to learn about 0:00:36.000 --> 0:00:38.680 a m D, where it came from, and its role 0:00:38.720 --> 0:00:41.440 in the tech industry in general, because it's a pretty 0:00:41.520 --> 0:00:44.519 interesting story and I knew bits and pieces of it, 0:00:44.760 --> 0:00:47.920 but like any subject for tech Stuff, as I dive 0:00:47.960 --> 0:00:52.240 into the research, I learned way more than I had 0:00:52.320 --> 0:00:55.440 ever learned before, and I end up going down lots 0:00:55.480 --> 0:00:58.440 of rabbit holes. And of course, to understand the history 0:00:58.520 --> 0:01:00.920 of a m D, WILL need to talk about a 0:01:00.920 --> 0:01:03.840 couple of other companies first, as they would lay the 0:01:03.880 --> 0:01:06.160 ground for a m D and a couple of other 0:01:06.240 --> 0:01:11.200 really big organizations in the microchip industry. And at the 0:01:11.360 --> 0:01:16.640 center of this prehistory for a m D was William Shockley. 0:01:16.680 --> 0:01:20.520 Now I've talked about Shockley a few times in past 0:01:20.600 --> 0:01:23.640 episodes of tech Stuff. He was, without a doubt a 0:01:23.760 --> 0:01:27.240 brilliant engineer, though in other ways he was also a 0:01:27.360 --> 0:01:32.319 deeply flawed human being who harbored some truly horrible traits. 0:01:32.720 --> 0:01:34.920 And you might think that such a comment isn't really 0:01:35.000 --> 0:01:37.960 germane to the discussion of technology, But as it turns out, 0:01:38.280 --> 0:01:42.280 Shockley's personality plays just as important a role in the 0:01:42.280 --> 0:01:46.800 emergence of a m D as his experimental work did. Now, 0:01:46.840 --> 0:01:51.360 Shockley worked at Bell Labs, specifically in their solid state 0:01:51.440 --> 0:01:54.960 physics research department, and he would play an important part 0:01:55.000 --> 0:01:58.320 in the development of the transistor, which was an alternative 0:01:58.360 --> 0:02:01.640 to the vacuum tube technolology that had come before and 0:02:01.720 --> 0:02:05.600 had proved to be a limitation on technology in general 0:02:05.720 --> 0:02:09.360 and electronics in particular. So, hey, what the heck do 0:02:09.480 --> 0:02:12.720 vacuum tubes do? And what do transistors do? Was the 0:02:12.760 --> 0:02:16.160 big deal with them? Well, vacuum tubes are also known 0:02:16.240 --> 0:02:20.040 as thermionic tubes, and they look a lot like light bulbs. 0:02:20.480 --> 0:02:23.880 They are glass with a filament inside of them, and 0:02:23.919 --> 0:02:26.280 they work on the principle that if you add energy 0:02:26.320 --> 0:02:29.919 to a metal, as in, if you heat up that metal, 0:02:30.400 --> 0:02:34.240 the energy will cause the metal to eject electrons. And 0:02:34.280 --> 0:02:38.440 you probably remember this from science classes. Electrons inhabit an 0:02:38.520 --> 0:02:41.640 energy level orbit around the nucleus of an atom, and 0:02:41.680 --> 0:02:45.480 if you pour energy into that atom, it will boost 0:02:45.560 --> 0:02:48.720 the electron to higher energy level orbits. And if you 0:02:48.760 --> 0:02:51.600 pour in enough energy, you'll cause the electron to leave 0:02:51.680 --> 0:02:56.120 its atom entirely. John Ambrose Fleming would build the first 0:02:56.360 --> 0:03:00.240 vacuum tube like device, which he called an oscilla. Should 0:03:00.360 --> 0:03:04.600 valve way back in four His device had two electrodes, 0:03:05.000 --> 0:03:07.160 and that would be our good old buddies, the cathode 0:03:07.280 --> 0:03:10.880 and the anode. The cathode is the negatively charged electrode 0:03:10.960 --> 0:03:15.040 and is thus the source for electrons flowing through a system. 0:03:15.080 --> 0:03:19.320 The anode is the positively charged electrode, and it accepts electrons. 0:03:19.760 --> 0:03:22.600 Though we also need to remember that current direction is 0:03:22.639 --> 0:03:25.320 traditionally thought of as the direction of the flow of 0:03:25.480 --> 0:03:29.239 positive charge, So in other words, the flow of current 0:03:29.400 --> 0:03:33.200 is actually in the opposite direction of the electron movement. 0:03:33.720 --> 0:03:36.640 But that's really been Franklin's fault. Will just skip it 0:03:36.680 --> 0:03:41.160 for now. Fleming demonstrated that by heating the cathode, which 0:03:41.200 --> 0:03:44.680 is at one end of an enclosed glass tube inside 0:03:44.720 --> 0:03:47.120 of which Fleming had induced a vacuum, So there was 0:03:47.160 --> 0:03:49.800 a vacuum inside the tube. When you heat it up 0:03:49.840 --> 0:03:52.440 the cathode, it would give off electrons and those electrons 0:03:52.440 --> 0:03:56.440 could flow across the gap inside the tube between the 0:03:56.480 --> 0:03:59.560 cathode and the anode. They could leap through that vacuum. 0:04:00.080 --> 0:04:02.960 This type of component is called a diode because it 0:04:03.000 --> 0:04:07.440 only allows electrons to travel in one direction, and it's 0:04:07.520 --> 0:04:09.800 useful if you want to create a more complex device 0:04:09.840 --> 0:04:13.600 that works based on where electrons can and cannot go. Now, 0:04:13.600 --> 0:04:17.600 another smarty Pants named lead to Forest would add a 0:04:17.760 --> 0:04:22.040 third electrode to this system, and it's called a control grid. 0:04:22.480 --> 0:04:25.320 And the control grid can serve as both a control 0:04:25.480 --> 0:04:28.520 switch for how many electrons can travel from cathode to 0:04:28.560 --> 0:04:32.320 anode as well as an amplifier. And you can influence 0:04:32.400 --> 0:04:35.599 the current flowing through the vacuum tube by controlling the 0:04:35.640 --> 0:04:39.240 amount of voltage going into the control grid itself. So 0:04:39.320 --> 0:04:42.760 with a tiny change of voltage to the control grid, 0:04:43.080 --> 0:04:46.560 you can have a larger change manifest itself through the 0:04:46.600 --> 0:04:50.839 overall circuit. This was a triode and other variants would follow, 0:04:50.920 --> 0:04:55.920 making complex electronics possible. But while they were useful. Vacuum 0:04:55.920 --> 0:04:58.960 tubes are also really large, and they give up a 0:04:58.960 --> 0:05:02.400 lot of heat too. By the nineteen forties, physicists were 0:05:02.440 --> 0:05:06.120 looking at an interesting category of materials that might serve 0:05:06.240 --> 0:05:10.360 as a substitute for these large, bulky hot vacuum tubes, 0:05:10.680 --> 0:05:15.760 and that material category is called semiconductor material and semiconductors 0:05:15.760 --> 0:05:18.440 are why we have the electronics of today in the 0:05:18.440 --> 0:05:21.800 form that they are in. That being said, vacuum tubes 0:05:21.839 --> 0:05:24.880 still are useful. They are still used in electronics today, 0:05:24.920 --> 0:05:28.320 particularly in things like music amps. But that's a discussion 0:05:28.360 --> 0:05:31.719 for a different episode. So what about a semiconductor, because 0:05:31.760 --> 0:05:34.320 that is the bread and butter of companies like a 0:05:34.480 --> 0:05:37.880 M D well. A conductor, at least for the purposes 0:05:37.960 --> 0:05:40.880 of this episode, is a material that allows for the 0:05:40.920 --> 0:05:46.479 passage of electrons through that material. It conducts electricity. The 0:05:46.520 --> 0:05:49.960 opposite type of material is called an insulator. That's material 0:05:50.040 --> 0:05:54.359 that resists the flow of electrons through it. Semiconductors have 0:05:54.560 --> 0:05:59.919 conductivity that lies between a conductor and an insulator. In addition, 0:06:00.040 --> 0:06:05.400 the conductivity of a metal decreases as the metal's temperature increases, 0:06:05.720 --> 0:06:07.800 or another way to put it is that a metal's 0:06:07.920 --> 0:06:14.159 resistance to electricity increases as the temperature also increases. Semiconductors 0:06:14.160 --> 0:06:18.640 are actually the opposite. Their conductivity increases as temperature increases. 0:06:19.400 --> 0:06:21.640 There's one part of this picture that I need to 0:06:21.680 --> 0:06:26.080 really cover, and it's called doping. Now. Doping is when 0:06:26.120 --> 0:06:29.039 you take an otherwise pure substance and you add small 0:06:29.080 --> 0:06:33.000 amounts of some other material to it, so it becomes 0:06:33.040 --> 0:06:36.880 impure because you no longer have one type of atom 0:06:37.000 --> 0:06:41.479 in that substance. With semiconductors, we typically talk about silicon, 0:06:41.680 --> 0:06:44.000 although that would actually come a little later in the 0:06:44.040 --> 0:06:47.960 development of the transistor. But pure silicon is an insulator. 0:06:48.440 --> 0:06:50.440 So if you have a bunch of silicon atoms, they 0:06:50.480 --> 0:06:55.160 form silicon crystals, and the crystals all bind perfectly with 0:06:55.320 --> 0:06:59.360 each other. They have perfect covalent bonds between the atoms, 0:06:59.760 --> 0:07:03.200 so means there's no free electrons available to move around. 0:07:03.279 --> 0:07:07.000 So if you hit this stuff with a free electron, 0:07:07.440 --> 0:07:09.960 that free electron can't shake anything else loose. It's all 0:07:10.040 --> 0:07:13.760 kind of locked in, so it insulates electricity. But by 0:07:13.760 --> 0:07:17.840 adding small amounts of other materials like arsenic, you can 0:07:17.880 --> 0:07:21.720 add in some free electrons. See arsenic has some extra 0:07:21.840 --> 0:07:26.400 electron or an extra electron compared to silicon. So if 0:07:26.560 --> 0:07:29.760 arsenic is binding with silicon atoms, then you end up 0:07:29.760 --> 0:07:32.840 with this extra electron that's not bound to anything, and 0:07:32.880 --> 0:07:36.800 it will allow for some level of conductivity, all dependent 0:07:36.880 --> 0:07:40.680 upon how much arsenic per silicon you have in that mix. 0:07:41.120 --> 0:07:45.120 This would be called in type doping because you're adding 0:07:45.120 --> 0:07:50.119 electrons to the actual material and electrons have a negative charge, 0:07:50.160 --> 0:07:55.240 thus in type doping, or you could dope the silicon 0:07:55.360 --> 0:07:58.480 with something else like boron or gallium, which would mean 0:07:58.520 --> 0:08:01.880 the crystal would actually have a few free spaces for 0:08:01.960 --> 0:08:05.440 electrons or holes. So instead of having these perfect covalent 0:08:05.440 --> 0:08:09.160 bonds that are tight all the way across the entire material, 0:08:09.480 --> 0:08:12.440 you would have these little holes that could accept an 0:08:12.480 --> 0:08:17.760 incoming electron. This is called P type doping. By putting 0:08:17.840 --> 0:08:21.840 in type and P type silicon together, you can create 0:08:21.880 --> 0:08:24.920 a diode, and by adding a third layer so that 0:08:24.960 --> 0:08:28.160 you either have N P N or a P N 0:08:28.240 --> 0:08:32.600 P sandwich of doped silicon, which honestly sounds pretty gross, 0:08:33.120 --> 0:08:36.679 you would get a transistor. And that's what Bell Labs 0:08:36.720 --> 0:08:40.200 was trying to create back in the late nineteen forties. Now, 0:08:40.280 --> 0:08:44.240 Shockley's research group was able to develop a transistor that 0:08:44.280 --> 0:08:47.720 could perform the same tasks in electronics as a vacuum tube. 0:08:48.120 --> 0:08:50.959 The first ones were very large and bulky and more 0:08:51.040 --> 0:08:54.840 like a proof of concept, but it quickly became apparent 0:08:55.320 --> 0:08:57.800 that this was going to be the future of electronics, 0:08:57.840 --> 0:09:00.679 and it was what would pave the way for many tourization, 0:09:00.960 --> 0:09:04.760 ultimately leading to a new era in electronics. And I 0:09:04.760 --> 0:09:07.320 should also point out that there were other team members 0:09:07.360 --> 0:09:10.600 besides Shockley who were working on this, like John Bardeen 0:09:10.720 --> 0:09:14.800 and Walter Brittaine and Gerald Pearson. They all made equally 0:09:14.840 --> 0:09:19.360 important contributions to make the transistor possible, but Shockley was 0:09:19.480 --> 0:09:25.520 frequently sourced as the the head or the the prime contributor, 0:09:26.160 --> 0:09:30.439 which is not entirely fair. Now, Shockley left Bell Labs 0:09:30.880 --> 0:09:34.000 and he went on to found his own company called 0:09:34.160 --> 0:09:38.880 Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, and he hired many brilliant people to 0:09:38.960 --> 0:09:42.760 work for him. But his personality and his leadership style 0:09:42.960 --> 0:09:47.319 was so confrontational it was demoralizing. He was described as 0:09:47.320 --> 0:09:50.960 being autocratic and paranoid, and he had a reputation for 0:09:51.120 --> 0:09:54.600 insulting his employees, building them way up early on and 0:09:54.600 --> 0:09:58.120 then gradually undercutting them as the relationship would continue in 0:09:58.240 --> 0:10:01.439 as you might imagine, this led to a pretty unhappy 0:10:01.559 --> 0:10:05.480 work environment. On a side note, Shockley would later espouse 0:10:05.679 --> 0:10:09.760 some truly terrible racist beliefs. And I feel it's important 0:10:09.760 --> 0:10:11.840 to note this because I don't believe in giving a 0:10:11.880 --> 0:10:15.320 free pass to someone simply because they made truly monumental 0:10:15.360 --> 0:10:20.400 contributions to the advancement of technology. We can't deny those contributions. 0:10:20.440 --> 0:10:25.200 They were absolutely important and they transformed our world. At 0:10:25.240 --> 0:10:28.520 the same time, we shouldn't ignore the negative aspects of 0:10:28.559 --> 0:10:32.040 someone's contributions either. We should take in the full picture. Okay, 0:10:32.080 --> 0:10:35.680 So Shockley was in the running for world's Worst boss, 0:10:35.960 --> 0:10:38.520 and it all came to a head in nineteen fifty seven, 0:10:38.760 --> 0:10:41.360 a little more than a year after Shockley had created 0:10:41.400 --> 0:10:45.400 the company in the first place, eight employees, all engineers 0:10:45.400 --> 0:10:50.440 with PhDs, confronted a board member of Shockley Semiconductor named 0:10:50.559 --> 0:10:53.000 Arnold Beckman. And I'll have to do a full episode 0:10:53.000 --> 0:10:56.360 on Beckman at some point. He's another fascinating person. But 0:10:56.440 --> 0:10:59.360 they voiced their concerns to him, and Beckman heard them out, 0:10:59.800 --> 0:11:02.000 and he tried to kind of work out a compromise, 0:11:02.080 --> 0:11:04.360 but it was really too little too late. So the 0:11:04.440 --> 0:11:08.240 eight decided to leave the company, and Shockley would dub 0:11:08.360 --> 0:11:14.200 them the Traitorous Eight, very dramatic, and they included Julius Blank, 0:11:14.679 --> 0:11:21.280 Victor Greenwich, Jean Harney, Gene Kleiner, Jay Last, Sheldon Roberts, 0:11:21.400 --> 0:11:25.840 and a certain Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce. These eight 0:11:25.840 --> 0:11:29.240 individuals approached a company called the fair Child Camera and 0:11:29.520 --> 0:11:33.679 Instrument Corporation, and that company was actually looking to diversify 0:11:33.720 --> 0:11:38.760 into the burgeoning semiconductor business at the time. Robert Noyce 0:11:38.800 --> 0:11:41.600 and Gordon Moore were sort of leaders of this charge, 0:11:42.040 --> 0:11:45.959 and after coming to terms with fair Child, including each 0:11:46.040 --> 0:11:49.160 of the engineers sinking five dollars of their own money 0:11:49.280 --> 0:11:53.280 into the uh the whole endeavor as an initial investment, 0:11:53.640 --> 0:11:58.760 they created a new division called fair Child Semiconductor. Now 0:11:58.760 --> 0:12:02.760 I've covered fair Child in episodes, but granted those episodes 0:12:02.800 --> 0:12:07.240 aired way back in two thousand thirteen. The company did 0:12:07.320 --> 0:12:10.800 a lot of really big things in technology, including bringing 0:12:10.840 --> 0:12:14.320 the integrated circuit to market. Though I should mention that 0:12:14.360 --> 0:12:18.280 the engineers over at Texas Instruments had also independently created 0:12:18.360 --> 0:12:22.040 an integrated circuit. Fair Child was just really fast at 0:12:22.040 --> 0:12:25.839 getting that to consumers um and by consumers, I really 0:12:25.880 --> 0:12:28.080 mean other businesses. This is sort of a business to 0:12:28.160 --> 0:12:31.760 business kind of enterprise. But fair Child was also known 0:12:32.120 --> 0:12:35.920 for giving birth to other companies, and we sometimes call 0:12:36.040 --> 0:12:40.600 these other companies the fair Children. In nineteen sixty eight, 0:12:40.800 --> 0:12:43.800 after working at fair Child for about a decade, Robert 0:12:43.800 --> 0:12:45.920 Noyce and Gordon Moore decided they were going to leave 0:12:46.080 --> 0:12:48.559 fair Child and they were going to start their own company, 0:12:48.760 --> 0:12:52.320 and they called it Intel. Intel will pop in and 0:12:52.320 --> 0:12:55.160 out of our story of a m D as it 0:12:55.240 --> 0:12:58.440 was not just a m d's chief rival and still is, 0:12:59.480 --> 0:13:05.719 but so has a strangely collaborative relationship with a m D. 0:13:05.960 --> 0:13:09.440 So there's both competition and collaboration between the two companies. 0:13:09.480 --> 0:13:12.679 I'll explain more later. Now, in the wake of noise 0:13:12.760 --> 0:13:16.360 and more departing fair Child, fair Child Semiconductor reached out 0:13:16.400 --> 0:13:20.760 to a physicist over at Motorola named see Lester Hogan, 0:13:20.920 --> 0:13:23.840 yet another person I'll have to do a full episode 0:13:23.880 --> 0:13:28.400 on in the future, and fair Child offered Hogan. I 0:13:28.400 --> 0:13:32.120 will modestly call it a pretty darn sweet deal. That's 0:13:32.360 --> 0:13:35.800 underselling how crazy good this deal was for Hogan. But 0:13:36.280 --> 0:13:39.640 this is not an episode about fair Child, so they 0:13:39.679 --> 0:13:41.920 wanted Hogan to come over to fair Child to manage 0:13:41.960 --> 0:13:45.920 the semiconductor team. So Hogan brought seven Motorola executives with 0:13:46.040 --> 0:13:50.439 him and they were collectively known as Hogan's heroes. So 0:13:51.000 --> 0:13:53.959 we've got the Traitorous Eight and we have Hogan's Heroes, 0:13:54.040 --> 0:13:56.760 and this makes the early days of Silicon Valley sound 0:13:56.800 --> 0:14:00.840 like some sort of Tarantino movie. Hogan the Way had 0:14:00.840 --> 0:14:05.000 previously worked under Shockley over at Bell Labs, so he 0:14:05.080 --> 0:14:07.679 had that in common with the trader Is Eight, though 0:14:07.840 --> 0:14:12.040 he didn't join Shockley's semiconductor company when Shockley left Bell Labs, 0:14:12.480 --> 0:14:16.319 and Hogan's team had a very conservative management style, something 0:14:16.360 --> 0:14:20.000 that clashed with another fair Child Semiconductor employee, a guy 0:14:20.080 --> 0:14:25.359 named Walter Jeremiah Sanders the Third or just Jerry Sanders. 0:14:25.800 --> 0:14:29.040 And Jerry Sanders will play a very important role in 0:14:29.120 --> 0:14:32.280 our story. I'll explain more in just a second, but 0:14:32.400 --> 0:14:44.120 first let's take a quick break. Jerry Sanders grew up 0:14:44.200 --> 0:14:47.120 in the nineteen forties. He was raised by his grandparents 0:14:47.160 --> 0:14:50.680 after his parents essentially abandoned him. He grew up on 0:14:50.720 --> 0:14:53.960 the South Side of Chicago, fairly rough part of Chicago 0:14:54.000 --> 0:14:56.400 at the time, and according to an article in sf 0:14:56.480 --> 0:14:59.360 Gate and a few other sources, when he was eighteen 0:14:59.440 --> 0:15:01.760 years old, he rushed to help a friend of his 0:15:01.800 --> 0:15:05.000 who was being attacked by a gang, and he himself 0:15:05.080 --> 0:15:07.000 was also beaten up, and he was being up so 0:15:07.080 --> 0:15:10.440 badly that he went into a coma for a few days, 0:15:10.440 --> 0:15:14.960 and a priest actually administered last rites. But he recovered 0:15:15.000 --> 0:15:18.200 from that and he was able to succeed despite his 0:15:18.400 --> 0:15:21.360 tough past. He enrolled in the University of Illinois and 0:15:21.400 --> 0:15:24.440 graduated with a degree in engineering, and he got hired 0:15:24.440 --> 0:15:27.640 by Fairchild to be a sales engineer and also a 0:15:27.680 --> 0:15:32.040 marketing manager, and he became known for being particularly successful 0:15:32.240 --> 0:15:35.720 in that regard. But then Nois and more left and 0:15:35.760 --> 0:15:38.760 Hogan and his heroes swooped in and they changed things 0:15:39.200 --> 0:15:43.040 and they effectively pushed Sanders aside. They essentially they called 0:15:43.080 --> 0:15:45.680 it a promotion, but it really was a d motion. 0:15:45.840 --> 0:15:48.600 He went from a director of marketing to being sort 0:15:48.640 --> 0:15:52.320 of a vice president of marketing, and it was really 0:15:52.440 --> 0:15:54.960 seen as as more of a let's get this guy 0:15:55.000 --> 0:15:57.720 out of the way. Sanders was thirty three years old 0:15:57.720 --> 0:16:01.000 at the time. Now Sanders and seven other fair Child 0:16:01.120 --> 0:16:04.960 employees would end up leaving fair Child Semiconductor to go 0:16:05.000 --> 0:16:09.920 and found a new organization. Now, according to most accounts, 0:16:09.960 --> 0:16:12.280 if you go and you start searching for history of 0:16:12.400 --> 0:16:15.200 a m D on the net, you're gonna find a 0:16:15.280 --> 0:16:18.160 very similar story told over and over again. And the 0:16:18.200 --> 0:16:21.840 story goes that the Jerry Sanders effectively led this charge 0:16:21.880 --> 0:16:24.960 and he got the team together to form this new company. So, 0:16:25.000 --> 0:16:30.640 according to the history of semi conductor engineering, Jack Gifford, 0:16:30.720 --> 0:16:34.000 who had become the head of computer marketing at Fairchild 0:16:34.040 --> 0:16:37.520 in early nineteen nine, saw the writing on the wall 0:16:37.760 --> 0:16:41.840 when Hogan's heroes swept into the company. He had already 0:16:41.880 --> 0:16:46.960 been considering the possibility of starting his own analog circuit company, 0:16:47.000 --> 0:16:49.800 but he was young. He was just twenty eight years 0:16:49.800 --> 0:16:52.720 old at the time, and when he decided to take 0:16:52.800 --> 0:16:56.640 that leap, he found he couldn't get any financial backing 0:16:56.720 --> 0:16:59.880 for his business. His buddy, Bruce Waterfall, told him that 0:17:00.120 --> 0:17:04.520 the problem was the financiers thought Gifford was too young 0:17:04.840 --> 0:17:09.199 and inexperienced, and therefore he posed an investment risk. So 0:17:09.280 --> 0:17:12.400 Waterfall reportedly told Gifford that he needed to find someone 0:17:12.560 --> 0:17:16.520 older and more experienced whom the bankers would find more reassuring, 0:17:17.160 --> 0:17:21.359 and Jack then thought of Jerry Sanders, who, according to 0:17:21.480 --> 0:17:25.040 the book, had just left Fairchild himself after being pushed 0:17:25.080 --> 0:17:29.040 aside by Hogan. Sanders was apparently considering a new career, 0:17:29.480 --> 0:17:33.120 going into the recording business in Hollywood, and initially he 0:17:33.200 --> 0:17:36.280 wasn't interested in Gifford's pitch to start a new analog 0:17:36.359 --> 0:17:40.320 circuit company. Sanders response was effectively, I'll do it on 0:17:40.359 --> 0:17:43.240 two conditions. One, I have to be the president of 0:17:43.240 --> 0:17:45.399 the company, and too, it's not going to be an 0:17:45.440 --> 0:17:49.240 analog circuit company, but a digital circuit company. Gifford found 0:17:49.320 --> 0:17:53.199 himself without any real leverage, and he agreed. Getting the 0:17:53.240 --> 0:17:56.000 money also proved to be a little tricky. One of 0:17:56.000 --> 0:17:59.280 the investment groups they approached was called the Capital Group, 0:17:59.800 --> 0:18:02.280 and there was a guy there named Jim Martin who 0:18:02.320 --> 0:18:05.240 was working there, and that might have already spelled doom 0:18:05.359 --> 0:18:07.640 for the new company before things could even get started, 0:18:08.280 --> 0:18:11.240 because it turned out Jim Martin had previously worked for 0:18:11.320 --> 0:18:14.280 fair Child, but he had been fired. In fact, he 0:18:14.320 --> 0:18:18.080 had been fired by a certain Jerry Sanders. This has 0:18:18.119 --> 0:18:21.080 me imagining a scene in which Sanders, looking for investment 0:18:21.119 --> 0:18:24.960 capital for Gifford's company idea walks into the office of 0:18:25.000 --> 0:18:28.600 a guy he had once fired at his old company 0:18:28.600 --> 0:18:31.160 in the past. But Jim Martin was also good friends 0:18:31.200 --> 0:18:34.560 with Jack Gifford, and so he worked with his colleagues 0:18:34.600 --> 0:18:37.760 at the Capitol Group to provide an initial investment in 0:18:37.840 --> 0:18:41.159 the new company. And this new company's name would be 0:18:41.240 --> 0:18:45.720 Advanced micro Devices or a m D, and it incorporated 0:18:45.720 --> 0:18:51.000 on May one, nine nine. So from Chockley's semiconductor lab, 0:18:51.240 --> 0:18:53.560 we can trace a path not just a fair Child, 0:18:53.800 --> 0:18:56.879 but also Intel and a m D. And while a 0:18:57.080 --> 0:18:59.640 m D would become known as a competitor with Intel, 0:19:00.200 --> 0:19:03.159 things would start off a little bit differently. A m 0:19:03.240 --> 0:19:07.119 D was originally in Santa Clara, California, but quickly moved 0:19:07.200 --> 0:19:10.040 to Sunny Vale just a few months after the founders 0:19:10.080 --> 0:19:14.280 formed the company. Their new DIGS had fifteen thousand square 0:19:14.320 --> 0:19:17.600 feet of space and was valued at half a million 0:19:17.680 --> 0:19:21.160 dollars at the time. While the engineers at Intel we're 0:19:21.160 --> 0:19:24.600 working on creating new microchips, a m d s first 0:19:24.720 --> 0:19:28.720 order of business was taking products from Fairchild and then 0:19:28.840 --> 0:19:32.160 redesigning them, essentially optimizing them and tweaking them. This would 0:19:32.200 --> 0:19:33.880 be something that a m D would get really good 0:19:33.920 --> 0:19:38.359 at not necessarily building its own products from the ground up, 0:19:38.359 --> 0:19:42.920 but taking other products and then optimizing them. These were 0:19:43.000 --> 0:19:45.920 mostly in the form of integrated circuits, and while a 0:19:46.080 --> 0:19:48.679 m D started in the business of building logic chips, 0:19:48.960 --> 0:19:52.800 they weren't yet creating CPUs themselves. Uh, the CPU is 0:19:52.840 --> 0:19:56.760 the primary logic chip in a computer. Now. To be fair, 0:19:57.280 --> 0:19:59.560 a m d s founding was right around the time 0:19:59.600 --> 0:20:03.960 when the concept of a CPU on a single chip 0:20:04.200 --> 0:20:08.280 was just starting to coalesce, because this was still the 0:20:08.359 --> 0:20:11.480 very early days of computers. Earlier, the logic center of 0:20:11.480 --> 0:20:16.480 a computer consisted of several different logic chips, all wired together, 0:20:16.920 --> 0:20:19.600 and each logic chip itself was an integrated circuit that 0:20:19.600 --> 0:20:23.399 would fit into the larger circuit of the central processing unit, 0:20:23.800 --> 0:20:27.840 which would, as I mentioned, consists of several chips. But 0:20:28.000 --> 0:20:32.520 many people, independently or depending upon whom you believe, not 0:20:32.720 --> 0:20:36.800 so independently, proposed that with the right architecture, you could 0:20:36.840 --> 0:20:40.960 build all the necessary logic components onto a single chip 0:20:41.040 --> 0:20:44.400 in an integrated circuit and create what was effectively a 0:20:44.400 --> 0:20:48.320 computer on a chip. Now, I said, depending upon whom 0:20:48.359 --> 0:20:52.440 you believe, because there are disputes regarding who first came 0:20:52.520 --> 0:20:55.840 up with the notion of a computer on a chip. 0:20:56.240 --> 0:20:58.960 There's some arguments about who it was that first proposed this, 0:20:59.320 --> 0:21:02.320 and there's the past ability that people responsible for building 0:21:02.359 --> 0:21:06.520 what would become the first true single chip CPU may 0:21:06.600 --> 0:21:10.399 have learned about the possibility from another person who had 0:21:10.400 --> 0:21:13.080 already proposed it and had worked for them in a 0:21:13.200 --> 0:21:17.399 previous company. But the unfolding all of that would require 0:21:17.440 --> 0:21:20.399 an episode all by itself. The episode about how the 0:21:20.560 --> 0:21:23.040 CPU on a chip came to be would be a 0:21:23.040 --> 0:21:27.119 pretty dramatic story that I don't have time to tell today. 0:21:27.400 --> 0:21:31.280 So single chip CPUs were not yet realized when a 0:21:31.440 --> 0:21:34.120 m D first started, and it makes sense that they 0:21:34.119 --> 0:21:38.360 began with basic logic chips what we would consider components 0:21:38.560 --> 0:21:42.080 of an overall central processing unit today. They were chips 0:21:42.119 --> 0:21:47.840 like an arithmetic logic unit and a control unit. So 0:21:47.880 --> 0:21:51.359 these are all elements that are now integrated into the 0:21:51.359 --> 0:21:54.600 CPUs we have today, but in the old days, they 0:21:54.600 --> 0:21:58.480 were all discrete components that you would have to, you know, 0:21:58.720 --> 0:22:02.720 put together in your circuit. Their first really successful component 0:22:02.800 --> 0:22:04.800 came out a year after the founding of the company, 0:22:04.920 --> 0:22:07.679 so in nineteen seventy, and it was called the a 0:22:08.040 --> 0:22:11.879 M to five O one logic counter. It was the 0:22:11.920 --> 0:22:17.600 industry's first binary slash hexadecimal up down counter. So what 0:22:17.640 --> 0:22:20.240 the heck does that mean? I could just say that 0:22:20.400 --> 0:22:23.720 and move on, but I feel like without describing what 0:22:23.840 --> 0:22:28.600 binary hexadecimal counters do, it's meaningless. Right, I could have 0:22:28.640 --> 0:22:31.200 said any gobbledygook and it would have been just as fine. 0:22:31.280 --> 0:22:35.399 So binary, of course, refers to the two state basic 0:22:35.480 --> 0:22:39.760 unit of logic in computers, and we represent binary as 0:22:39.800 --> 0:22:42.600 being either a zero or a one. So you can 0:22:42.600 --> 0:22:45.080 think of it like a light switch, right, it's either 0:22:45.240 --> 0:22:48.440 off or it's on. It can't be both, it can't. 0:22:48.480 --> 0:22:50.840 It has to be one or the other. And if 0:22:50.840 --> 0:22:55.160 you use strings of binary digits series of zeros and ones, 0:22:55.480 --> 0:22:59.000 you can represent all sorts of stuff, from other numbers 0:22:59.040 --> 0:23:02.320 to letters, to pictures of cats and so on. But 0:23:02.680 --> 0:23:06.120 it takes a lot of binary numbers to represent the stuff. 0:23:06.400 --> 0:23:10.760 And as you work with larger digital systems, you start 0:23:10.800 --> 0:23:14.480 to discover that working with binary becomes unwieldy. It's very 0:23:14.520 --> 0:23:17.919 hard to read or write blocks of binary code, and 0:23:17.960 --> 0:23:21.520 it's super hard to do so without introducing errors in 0:23:21.560 --> 0:23:25.240 the process. So one way to deal with This is 0:23:25.240 --> 0:23:28.879 to group sets of four bits together. A bit is 0:23:29.119 --> 0:23:31.800 that basic unit of information, a zero or a one, 0:23:32.640 --> 0:23:35.200 So you can group these four bits together into another 0:23:35.240 --> 0:23:39.280 type of numbering system called hexadecimal numbers. Now hexa decimal 0:23:39.359 --> 0:23:44.240 numbers is a base sixteen numbering system. We use a 0:23:44.280 --> 0:23:48.200 base ten numbering system. We go from zero to nine, 0:23:48.640 --> 0:23:51.359 and when we get past nine, you have ten, which 0:23:51.400 --> 0:23:54.320 is again you start back at zero, and then you 0:23:54.359 --> 0:23:58.560 have a one in the tens column for that number. 0:23:58.760 --> 0:24:00.640 But you go all the way back up to nineteen, 0:24:00.840 --> 0:24:02.359 and then you start over again, and now you have 0:24:02.400 --> 0:24:08.240 a two in that ten's column. Well, hexadecimal is base sixteen, 0:24:08.560 --> 0:24:11.240 and that presents a challenge, right because if you're talking 0:24:11.280 --> 0:24:14.840 about base sixteen, you would normally start with zero. Then 0:24:14.840 --> 0:24:18.280 you'd work up to fifteen. But how could you tell 0:24:18.520 --> 0:24:22.720 a ten apart from the two digits of one and 0:24:22.840 --> 0:24:25.880 zero that are side by side. Right, If you can 0:24:25.920 --> 0:24:29.880 have a zero and a one in your numbering system, 0:24:30.000 --> 0:24:33.160 and you can have a ten in your numbering system 0:24:33.160 --> 0:24:35.280 and it's base sixteen, you can't tell the difference between 0:24:35.280 --> 0:24:38.480 a ten and a one zero. So anything ten or 0:24:39.000 --> 0:24:42.879 higher ten to fifteen would be confusing, and so for 0:24:42.920 --> 0:24:47.720