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 am your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer
Speaker 1: with How Stuff Works and I heart radio and I
Speaker 1: love all things tech and tech Stuff. Listener Stephen asked
Speaker 1: me a long time ago if I could do an
Speaker 1: episode or two about the company A m D. And
Speaker 1: it's been a long time, Stephen, but now I'm getting
Speaker 1: to that episode. So today we're going to learn about
Speaker 1: a m D, where it came from, and its role
Speaker 1: in the tech industry in general, because it's a pretty
Speaker 1: interesting story and I knew bits and pieces of it,
Speaker 1: but like any subject for tech Stuff, as I dive
Speaker 1: into the research, I learned way more than I had
Speaker 1: ever learned before, and I end up going down lots
Speaker 1: of rabbit holes. And of course, to understand the history
Speaker 1: of a m D, WILL need to talk about a
Speaker 1: couple of other companies first, as they would lay the
Speaker 1: ground for a m D and a couple of other
Speaker 1: really big organizations in the microchip industry. And at the
Speaker 1: center of this prehistory for a m D was William Shockley.
Speaker 1: Now I've talked about Shockley a few times in past
Speaker 1: episodes of tech Stuff. He was, without a doubt a
Speaker 1: brilliant engineer, though in other ways he was also a
Speaker 1: deeply flawed human being who harbored some truly horrible traits.
Speaker 1: And you might think that such a comment isn't really
Speaker 1: germane to the discussion of technology, But as it turns out,
Speaker 1: Shockley's personality plays just as important a role in the
Speaker 1: emergence of a m D as his experimental work did. Now,
Speaker 1: Shockley worked at Bell Labs, specifically in their solid state
Speaker 1: physics research department, and he would play an important part
Speaker 1: in the development of the transistor, which was an alternative
Speaker 1: to the vacuum tube technolology that had come before and
Speaker 1: had proved to be a limitation on technology in general
Speaker 1: and electronics in particular. So, hey, what the heck do
Speaker 1: vacuum tubes do? And what do transistors do? Was the
Speaker 1: big deal with them? Well, vacuum tubes are also known
Speaker 1: as thermionic tubes, and they look a lot like light bulbs.
Speaker 1: They are glass with a filament inside of them, and
Speaker 1: they work on the principle that if you add energy
Speaker 1: to a metal, as in, if you heat up that metal,
Speaker 1: the energy will cause the metal to eject electrons. And
Speaker 1: you probably remember this from science classes. Electrons inhabit an
Speaker 1: energy level orbit around the nucleus of an atom, and
Speaker 1: if you pour energy into that atom, it will boost
Speaker 1: the electron to higher energy level orbits. And if you
Speaker 1: pour in enough energy, you'll cause the electron to leave
Speaker 1: its atom entirely. John Ambrose Fleming would build the first
Speaker 1: vacuum tube like device, which he called an oscilla. Should
Speaker 1: valve way back in four His device had two electrodes,
Speaker 1: and that would be our good old buddies, the cathode
Speaker 1: and the anode. The cathode is the negatively charged electrode
Speaker 1: and is thus the source for electrons flowing through a system.
Speaker 1: The anode is the positively charged electrode, and it accepts electrons.
Speaker 1: Though we also need to remember that current direction is
Speaker 1: traditionally thought of as the direction of the flow of
Speaker 1: positive charge, So in other words, the flow of current
Speaker 1: is actually in the opposite direction of the electron movement.
Speaker 1: But that's really been Franklin's fault. Will just skip it
Speaker 1: for now. Fleming demonstrated that by heating the cathode, which
Speaker 1: is at one end of an enclosed glass tube inside
Speaker 1: of which Fleming had induced a vacuum, So there was
Speaker 1: a vacuum inside the tube. When you heat it up
Speaker 1: the cathode, it would give off electrons and those electrons
Speaker 1: could flow across the gap inside the tube between the
Speaker 1: cathode and the anode. They could leap through that vacuum.
Speaker 1: This type of component is called a diode because it
Speaker 1: only allows electrons to travel in one direction, and it's
Speaker 1: useful if you want to create a more complex device
Speaker 1: that works based on where electrons can and cannot go. Now,
Speaker 1: another smarty Pants named lead to Forest would add a
Speaker 1: third electrode to this system, and it's called a control grid.
Speaker 1: And the control grid can serve as both a control
Speaker 1: switch for how many electrons can travel from cathode to
Speaker 1: anode as well as an amplifier. And you can influence
Speaker 1: the current flowing through the vacuum tube by controlling the
Speaker 1: amount of voltage going into the control grid itself. So
Speaker 1: with a tiny change of voltage to the control grid,
Speaker 1: you can have a larger change manifest itself through the
Speaker 1: overall circuit. This was a triode and other variants would follow,
Speaker 1: making complex electronics possible. But while they were useful. Vacuum
Speaker 1: tubes are also really large, and they give up a
Speaker 1: lot of heat too. By the nineteen forties, physicists were
Speaker 1: looking at an interesting category of materials that might serve
Speaker 1: as a substitute for these large, bulky hot vacuum tubes,
Speaker 1: and that material category is called semiconductor material and semiconductors
Speaker 1: are why we have the electronics of today in the
Speaker 1: form that they are in. That being said, vacuum tubes
Speaker 1: still are useful. They are still used in electronics today,
Speaker 1: particularly in things like music amps. But that's a discussion
Speaker 1: for a different episode. So what about a semiconductor, because
Speaker 1: that is the bread and butter of companies like a
Speaker 1: M D well. A conductor, at least for the purposes
Speaker 1: of this episode, is a material that allows for the
Speaker 1: passage of electrons through that material. It conducts electricity. The
Speaker 1: opposite type of material is called an insulator. That's material
Speaker 1: that resists the flow of electrons through it. Semiconductors have
Speaker 1: conductivity that lies between a conductor and an insulator. In addition,
Speaker 1: the conductivity of a metal decreases as the metal's temperature increases,
Speaker 1: or another way to put it is that a metal's
Speaker 1: resistance to electricity increases as the temperature also increases. Semiconductors
Speaker 1: are actually the opposite. Their conductivity increases as temperature increases.
Speaker 1: There's one part of this picture that I need to
Speaker 1: really cover, and it's called doping. Now. Doping is when
Speaker 1: you take an otherwise pure substance and you add small
Speaker 1: amounts of some other material to it, so it becomes
Speaker 1: impure because you no longer have one type of atom
Speaker 1: in that substance. With semiconductors, we typically talk about silicon,
Speaker 1: although that would actually come a little later in the
Speaker 1: development of the transistor. But pure silicon is an insulator.
Speaker 1: So if you have a bunch of silicon atoms, they
Speaker 1: form silicon crystals, and the crystals all bind perfectly with
Speaker 1: each other. They have perfect covalent bonds between the atoms,
Speaker 1: so means there's no free electrons available to move around.
Speaker 1: So if you hit this stuff with a free electron,
Speaker 1: that free electron can't shake anything else loose. It's all
Speaker 1: kind of locked in, so it insulates electricity. But by
Speaker 1: adding small amounts of other materials like arsenic, you can
Speaker 1: add in some free electrons. See arsenic has some extra
Speaker 1: electron or an extra electron compared to silicon. So if
Speaker 1: arsenic is binding with silicon atoms, then you end up
Speaker 1: with this extra electron that's not bound to anything, and
Speaker 1: it will allow for some level of conductivity, all dependent
Speaker 1: upon how much arsenic per silicon you have in that mix.
Speaker 1: This would be called in type doping because you're adding
Speaker 1: electrons to the actual material and electrons have a negative charge,
Speaker 1: thus in type doping, or you could dope the silicon
Speaker 1: with something else like boron or gallium, which would mean
Speaker 1: the crystal would actually have a few free spaces for
Speaker 1: electrons or holes. So instead of having these perfect covalent
Speaker 1: bonds that are tight all the way across the entire material,
Speaker 1: you would have these little holes that could accept an
Speaker 1: incoming electron. This is called P type doping. By putting
Speaker 1: in type and P type silicon together, you can create
Speaker 1: a diode, and by adding a third layer so that
Speaker 1: you either have N P N or a P N
Speaker 1: P sandwich of doped silicon, which honestly sounds pretty gross,
Speaker 1: you would get a transistor. And that's what Bell Labs
Speaker 1: was trying to create back in the late nineteen forties. Now,
Speaker 1: Shockley's research group was able to develop a transistor that
Speaker 1: could perform the same tasks in electronics as a vacuum tube.
Speaker 1: The first ones were very large and bulky and more
Speaker 1: like a proof of concept, but it quickly became apparent
Speaker 1: that this was going to be the future of electronics,
Speaker 1: and it was what would pave the way for many tourization,
Speaker 1: ultimately leading to a new era in electronics. And I
Speaker 1: should also point out that there were other team members
Speaker 1: besides Shockley who were working on this, like John Bardeen
Speaker 1: and Walter Brittaine and Gerald Pearson. They all made equally
Speaker 1: important contributions to make the transistor possible, but Shockley was
Speaker 1: frequently sourced as the the head or the the prime contributor,
Speaker 1: which is not entirely fair. Now, Shockley left Bell Labs
Speaker 1: and he went on to found his own company called
Speaker 1: Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, and he hired many brilliant people to
Speaker 1: work for him. But his personality and his leadership style
Speaker 1: was so confrontational it was demoralizing. He was described as
Speaker 1: being autocratic and paranoid, and he had a reputation for
Speaker 1: insulting his employees, building them way up early on and
Speaker 1: then gradually undercutting them as the relationship would continue in
Speaker 1: as you might imagine, this led to a pretty unhappy
Speaker 1: work environment. On a side note, Shockley would later espouse
Speaker 1: some truly terrible racist beliefs. And I feel it's important
Speaker 1: to note this because I don't believe in giving a
Speaker 1: free pass to someone simply because they made truly monumental
Speaker 1: contributions to the advancement of technology. We can't deny those contributions.
Speaker 1: They were absolutely important and they transformed our world. At
Speaker 1: the same time, we shouldn't ignore the negative aspects of
Speaker 1: someone's contributions either. We should take in the full picture. Okay,
Speaker 1: So Shockley was in the running for world's Worst boss,
Speaker 1: and it all came to a head in nineteen fifty seven,
Speaker 1: a little more than a year after Shockley had created
Speaker 1: the company in the first place, eight employees, all engineers
Speaker 1: with PhDs, confronted a board member of Shockley Semiconductor named
Speaker 1: Arnold Beckman. And I'll have to do a full episode
Speaker 1: on Beckman at some point. He's another fascinating person. But
Speaker 1: they voiced their concerns to him, and Beckman heard them out,
Speaker 1: and he tried to kind of work out a compromise,
Speaker 1: but it was really too little too late. So the
Speaker 1: eight decided to leave the company, and Shockley would dub
Speaker 1: them the Traitorous Eight, very dramatic, and they included Julius Blank,
Speaker 1: Victor Greenwich, Jean Harney, Gene Kleiner, Jay Last, Sheldon Roberts,
Speaker 1: and a certain Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce. These eight
Speaker 1: individuals approached a company called the fair Child Camera and
Speaker 1: Instrument Corporation, and that company was actually looking to diversify
Speaker 1: into the burgeoning semiconductor business at the time. Robert Noyce
Speaker 1: and Gordon Moore were sort of leaders of this charge,
Speaker 1: and after coming to terms with fair Child, including each
Speaker 1: of the engineers sinking five dollars of their own money
Speaker 1: into the uh the whole endeavor as an initial investment,
Speaker 1: they created a new division called fair Child Semiconductor. Now
Speaker 1: I've covered fair Child in episodes, but granted those episodes
Speaker 1: aired way back in two thousand thirteen. The company did
Speaker 1: a lot of really big things in technology, including bringing
Speaker 1: the integrated circuit to market. Though I should mention that
Speaker 1: the engineers over at Texas Instruments had also independently created
Speaker 1: an integrated circuit. Fair Child was just really fast at
Speaker 1: getting that to consumers um and by consumers, I really
Speaker 1: mean other businesses. This is sort of a business to
Speaker 1: business kind of enterprise. But fair Child was also known
Speaker 1: for giving birth to other companies, and we sometimes call
Speaker 1: these other companies the fair Children. In nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 1: after working at fair Child for about a decade, Robert
Speaker 1: Noyce and Gordon Moore decided they were going to leave
Speaker 1: fair Child and they were going to start their own company,
Speaker 1: and they called it Intel. Intel will pop in and
Speaker 1: out of our story of a m D as it
Speaker 1: was not just a m d's chief rival and still is,
Speaker 1: but so has a strangely collaborative relationship with a m D.
Speaker 1: So there's both competition and collaboration between the two companies.
Speaker 1: I'll explain more later. Now, in the wake of noise
Speaker 1: and more departing fair Child, fair Child Semiconductor reached out
Speaker 1: to a physicist over at Motorola named see Lester Hogan,
Speaker 1: yet another person I'll have to do a full episode
Speaker 1: on in the future, and fair Child offered Hogan. I
Speaker 1: will modestly call it a pretty darn sweet deal. That's
Speaker 1: underselling how crazy good this deal was for Hogan. But
Speaker 1: this is not an episode about fair Child, so they
Speaker 1: wanted Hogan to come over to fair Child to manage
Speaker 1: the semiconductor team. So Hogan brought seven Motorola executives with
Speaker 1: him and they were collectively known as Hogan's heroes. So
Speaker 1: we've got the Traitorous Eight and we have Hogan's Heroes,
Speaker 1: and this makes the early days of Silicon Valley sound
Speaker 1: like some sort of Tarantino movie. Hogan the Way had
Speaker 1: previously worked under Shockley over at Bell Labs, so he
Speaker 1: had that in common with the trader Is Eight, though
Speaker 1: he didn't join Shockley's semiconductor company when Shockley left Bell Labs,
Speaker 1: and Hogan's team had a very conservative management style, something
Speaker 1: that clashed with another fair Child Semiconductor employee, a guy
Speaker 1: named Walter Jeremiah Sanders the Third or just Jerry Sanders.
Speaker 1: And Jerry Sanders will play a very important role in
Speaker 1: our story. I'll explain more in just a second, but
Speaker 1: first let's take a quick break. Jerry Sanders grew up
Speaker 1: in the nineteen forties. He was raised by his grandparents
Speaker 1: after his parents essentially abandoned him. He grew up on
Speaker 1: the South Side of Chicago, fairly rough part of Chicago
Speaker 1: at the time, and according to an article in sf
Speaker 1: Gate and a few other sources, when he was eighteen
Speaker 1: years old, he rushed to help a friend of his
Speaker 1: who was being attacked by a gang, and he himself
Speaker 1: was also beaten up, and he was being up so
Speaker 1: badly that he went into a coma for a few days,
Speaker 1: and a priest actually administered last rites. But he recovered
Speaker 1: from that and he was able to succeed despite his
Speaker 1: tough past. He enrolled in the University of Illinois and
Speaker 1: graduated with a degree in engineering, and he got hired
Speaker 1: by Fairchild to be a sales engineer and also a
Speaker 1: marketing manager, and he became known for being particularly successful
Speaker 1: in that regard. But then Nois and more left and
Speaker 1: Hogan and his heroes swooped in and they changed things
Speaker 1: and they effectively pushed Sanders aside. They essentially they called
Speaker 1: it a promotion, but it really was a d motion.
Speaker 1: He went from a director of marketing to being sort
Speaker 1: of a vice president of marketing, and it was really
Speaker 1: seen as as more of a let's get this guy
Speaker 1: out of the way. Sanders was thirty three years old
Speaker 1: at the time. Now Sanders and seven other fair Child
Speaker 1: employees would end up leaving fair Child Semiconductor to go
Speaker 1: and found a new organization. Now, according to most accounts,
Speaker 1: if you go and you start searching for history of
Speaker 1: a m D on the net, you're gonna find a
Speaker 1: very similar story told over and over again. And the
Speaker 1: story goes that the Jerry Sanders effectively led this charge
Speaker 1: and he got the team together to form this new company. So,
Speaker 1: according to the history of semi conductor engineering, Jack Gifford,
Speaker 1: who had become the head of computer marketing at Fairchild
Speaker 1: in early nineteen nine, saw the writing on the wall
Speaker 1: when Hogan's heroes swept into the company. He had already
Speaker 1: been considering the possibility of starting his own analog circuit company,
Speaker 1: but he was young. He was just twenty eight years
Speaker 1: old at the time, and when he decided to take
Speaker 1: that leap, he found he couldn't get any financial backing
Speaker 1: for his business. His buddy, Bruce Waterfall, told him that
Speaker 1: the problem was the financiers thought Gifford was too young
Speaker 1: and inexperienced, and therefore he posed an investment risk. So
Speaker 1: Waterfall reportedly told Gifford that he needed to find someone
Speaker 1: older and more experienced whom the bankers would find more reassuring,
Speaker 1: and Jack then thought of Jerry Sanders, who, according to
Speaker 1: the book, had just left Fairchild himself after being pushed
Speaker 1: aside by Hogan. Sanders was apparently considering a new career,
Speaker 1: going into the recording business in Hollywood, and initially he
Speaker 1: wasn't interested in Gifford's pitch to start a new analog
Speaker 1: circuit company. Sanders response was effectively, I'll do it on
Speaker 1: two conditions. One, I have to be the president of
Speaker 1: the company, and too, it's not going to be an
Speaker 1: analog circuit company, but a digital circuit company. Gifford found
Speaker 1: himself without any real leverage, and he agreed. Getting the
Speaker 1: money also proved to be a little tricky. One of
Speaker 1: the investment groups they approached was called the Capital Group,
Speaker 1: and there was a guy there named Jim Martin who
Speaker 1: was working there, and that might have already spelled doom
Speaker 1: for the new company before things could even get started,
Speaker 1: because it turned out Jim Martin had previously worked for
Speaker 1: fair Child, but he had been fired. In fact, he
Speaker 1: had been fired by a certain Jerry Sanders. This has
Speaker 1: me imagining a scene in which Sanders, looking for investment
Speaker 1: capital for Gifford's company idea walks into the office of
Speaker 1: a guy he had once fired at his old company
Speaker 1: in the past. But Jim Martin was also good friends
Speaker 1: with Jack Gifford, and so he worked with his colleagues
Speaker 1: at the Capitol Group to provide an initial investment in
Speaker 1: the new company. And this new company's name would be
Speaker 1: Advanced micro Devices or a m D, and it incorporated
Speaker 1: on May one, nine nine. So from Chockley's semiconductor lab,
Speaker 1: we can trace a path not just a fair Child,
Speaker 1: but also Intel and a m D. And while a
Speaker 1: m D would become known as a competitor with Intel,
Speaker 1: things would start off a little bit differently. A m
Speaker 1: D was originally in Santa Clara, California, but quickly moved
Speaker 1: to Sunny Vale just a few months after the founders
Speaker 1: formed the company. Their new DIGS had fifteen thousand square
Speaker 1: feet of space and was valued at half a million
Speaker 1: dollars at the time. While the engineers at Intel we're
Speaker 1: working on creating new microchips, a m d s first
Speaker 1: order of business was taking products from Fairchild and then
Speaker 1: redesigning them, essentially optimizing them and tweaking them. This would
Speaker 1: be something that a m D would get really good
Speaker 1: at not necessarily building its own products from the ground up,
Speaker 1: but taking other products and then optimizing them. These were
Speaker 1: mostly in the form of integrated circuits, and while a
Speaker 1: m D started in the business of building logic chips,
Speaker 1: they weren't yet creating CPUs themselves. Uh, the CPU is
Speaker 1: the primary logic chip in a computer. Now. To be fair,
Speaker 1: a m d s founding was right around the time
Speaker 1: when the concept of a CPU on a single chip
Speaker 1: was just starting to coalesce, because this was still the
Speaker 1: very early days of computers. Earlier, the logic center of
Speaker 1: a computer consisted of several different logic chips, all wired together,
Speaker 1: and each logic chip itself was an integrated circuit that
Speaker 1: would fit into the larger circuit of the central processing unit,
Speaker 1: which would, as I mentioned, consists of several chips. But
Speaker 1: many people, independently or depending upon whom you believe, not
Speaker 1: so independently, proposed that with the right architecture, you could
Speaker 1: build all the necessary logic components onto a single chip
Speaker 1: in an integrated circuit and create what was effectively a
Speaker 1: computer on a chip. Now, I said, depending upon whom
Speaker 1: you believe, because there are disputes regarding who first came
Speaker 1: up with the notion of a computer on a chip.
Speaker 1: There's some arguments about who it was that first proposed this,
Speaker 1: and there's the past ability that people responsible for building
Speaker 1: what would become the first true single chip CPU may
Speaker 1: have learned about the possibility from another person who had
Speaker 1: already proposed it and had worked for them in a
Speaker 1: previous company. But the unfolding all of that would require
Speaker 1: an episode all by itself. The episode about how the
Speaker 1: CPU on a chip came to be would be a
Speaker 1: pretty dramatic story that I don't have time to tell today.
Speaker 1: So single chip CPUs were not yet realized when a
Speaker 1: m D first started, and it makes sense that they
Speaker 1: began with basic logic chips what we would consider components
Speaker 1: of an overall central processing unit today. They were chips
Speaker 1: like an arithmetic logic unit and a control unit. So
Speaker 1: these are all elements that are now integrated into the
Speaker 1: CPUs we have today, but in the old days, they
Speaker 1: were all discrete components that you would have to, you know,
Speaker 1: put together in your circuit. Their first really successful component
Speaker 1: came out a year after the founding of the company,
Speaker 1: so in nineteen seventy, and it was called the a
Speaker 1: M to five O one logic counter. It was the
Speaker 1: industry's first binary slash hexadecimal up down counter. So what
Speaker 1: the heck does that mean? I could just say that
Speaker 1: and move on, but I feel like without describing what
Speaker 1: binary hexadecimal counters do, it's meaningless. Right, I could have
Speaker 1: said any gobbledygook and it would have been just as fine.
Speaker 1: So binary, of course, refers to the two state basic
Speaker 1: unit of logic in computers, and we represent binary as
Speaker 1: being either a zero or a one. So you can
Speaker 1: think of it like a light switch, right, it's either
Speaker 1: off or it's on. It can't be both, it can't.
Speaker 1: It has to be one or the other. And if
Speaker 1: you use strings of binary digits series of zeros and ones,
Speaker 1: you can represent all sorts of stuff, from other numbers
Speaker 1: to letters, to pictures of cats and so on. But
Speaker 1: it takes a lot of binary numbers to represent the stuff.
Speaker 1: And as you work with larger digital systems, you start
Speaker 1: to discover that working with binary becomes unwieldy. It's very
Speaker 1: hard to read or write blocks of binary code, and
Speaker 1: it's super hard to do so without introducing errors in
Speaker 1: the process. So one way to deal with This is
Speaker 1: to group sets of four bits together. A bit is
Speaker 1: that basic unit of information, a zero or a one,
Speaker 1: So you can group these four bits together into another
Speaker 1: type of numbering system called hexadecimal numbers. Now hexa decimal
Speaker 1: numbers is a base sixteen numbering system. We use a
Speaker 1: base ten numbering system. We go from zero to nine,
Speaker 1: and when we get past nine, you have ten, which
Speaker 1: is again you start back at zero, and then you
Speaker 1: have a one in the tens column for that number.
Speaker 1: But you go all the way back up to nineteen,
Speaker 1: and then you start over again, and now you have
Speaker 1: a two in that ten's column. Well, hexadecimal is base sixteen,
Speaker 1: and that presents a challenge, right because if you're talking
Speaker 1: about base sixteen, you would normally start with zero. Then
Speaker 1: you'd work up to fifteen. But how could you tell
Speaker 1: a ten apart from the two digits of one and
Speaker 1: zero that are side by side. Right, If you can
Speaker 1: have a zero and a one in your numbering system,
Speaker 1: and you can have a ten in your numbering system
Speaker 1: and it's base sixteen, you can't tell the difference between
Speaker 1: a ten and a one zero. So anything ten or
Speaker 1: higher ten to fifteen would be confusing, and so for
Speaker 1: that reason, the digits ten, eleven, twelve, fourteen, and fifteen
Speaker 1: are in hexadecimal, represented by letters A, B, C, D, E,
Speaker 1: and F. So hexadecimal digits include zero through nine and
Speaker 1: A through f to represent binary or decimal numbers. Now,
Speaker 1: remember hexadecimal numbers represent groups of four bits. A zero
Speaker 1: in hexadecimal represents a binary string of four zeros in
Speaker 1: a row, and F and hexadecimal represents the four bit
Speaker 1: string of one one one one, Because that actually represents
Speaker 1: the decimal number of fifteen um you have. You essentially
Speaker 1: say one plus two plus four plus eight. That's how
Speaker 1: those different digit spots represent numbers. So to convert binary
Speaker 1: into hexadecimal, you would first take your big block of
Speaker 1: binary code and you divide it into four bit strings.
Speaker 1: Then you would convert each four bit string into the
Speaker 1: hexadecimal digit that represents that four bit string, and you
Speaker 1: have a slightly simpler way of representing all the information.
Speaker 1: So a m d S first successful logic counter could
Speaker 1: do this task and it became an important early component
Speaker 1: in mini computer systems of the early nineteen seventies. At
Speaker 1: the time of the A M to five zero one release.
Speaker 1: A m D had fifty three employees. The company had
Speaker 1: established a wafer fabrication lab that could make two inch
Speaker 1: silicon wafers and then a m D would then use
Speaker 1: that as a platform for integrated circuits, and the company
Speaker 1: was able to build circuits with elements on the seven
Speaker 1: micrometer scale, or if you're old school, the seven micron scale.
Speaker 1: A micrometer is one millionth of a meter, and today
Speaker 1: microprocessors are built on the nanometer scale that's one billionth
Speaker 1: of a meter, But in nineteen seventy the micrometer scale
Speaker 1: was pretty darn impressive. In an a m D engineer
Speaker 1: named Sven Simonson led a group that designed another successful
Speaker 1: A m D product, and it was a chip that
Speaker 1: handled multiplication. It was called the A M two five
Speaker 1: oh five and it was at the time the industry's
Speaker 1: fastest multiplier chip. So the company was making a name
Speaker 1: for itself building out these components that were outperforming other
Speaker 1: manufacturers that we're working in the same industry. One was
Speaker 1: also the year that a m D began to produce
Speaker 1: random access memory or RAM chips, and anyone who has
Speaker 1: gone shopping for computers has seen stuff about RAM, and
Speaker 1: I think most people realize it has something to do
Speaker 1: with computer performance, but they might not know what it
Speaker 1: actually is all about. Well, first you know it's it
Speaker 1: is memory, and memories purpose is to keep a record
Speaker 1: of information, and there are different types of memory. This
Speaker 1: is true for people and it's true for computers. So
Speaker 1: in computers, you have read only memory or ROM, you
Speaker 1: have random access memory or RAM, and then you have
Speaker 1: auxiliary memory, which we usually refer to as storage. So
Speaker 1: auxiliary memory is where information lives when you've saved it.
Speaker 1: It's in a way sort of analogous to our long
Speaker 1: term memory as human beings. But retrieving information from auxiliary
Speaker 1: memory takes a little bit of time. A computer has
Speaker 1: to go through the directory, find the information, retrieve it,
Speaker 1: and pull it up into the current moment. So if
Speaker 1: a computer had to refer to its auxiliary memory every
Speaker 1: time you want to run any sort of process related
Speaker 1: to that data, it would feel like it was really
Speaker 1: taking forever. Random access memory is more sort of like
Speaker 1: our our short term memory. It's used to temporarily store
Speaker 1: information for the purposes of working with that info and
Speaker 1: making it faster. So rather than having to pull up
Speaker 1: the data from storage every time the computer can store
Speaker 1: it temporarily in RAM. So the more RAM you have,
Speaker 1: the more information you can hold in this working memory.
Speaker 1: And that's why people tend to talk about having more
Speaker 1: RAM with your computer makes your computer faster. What's really
Speaker 1: doing is it's cutting down on how frequently your machine
Speaker 1: needs to consult it's auxiliary memory. So if it can
Speaker 1: load more data into RAM, then it doesn't need to
Speaker 1: pop back into the library as frequently. RAM is often
Speaker 1: referred to as volatile memory, and it will only hold
Speaker 1: information as long as the computer is powered on. Upon
Speaker 1: losing power, traditional RAM relinquishes all that information. Read only memory,
Speaker 1: by the way, or ROM has pre programmed information that's
Speaker 1: hard coded onto the memory itself and generally is used
Speaker 1: to hold stuff like basic sets of instructions that the
Speaker 1: computer has to follow in order to boot up and
Speaker 1: get the system ready for use. All right, so that's
Speaker 1: RAM in a nutshell. I'll have to do a full
Speaker 1: episode about later on to talk about the nitty gritty stuff,
Speaker 1: and when we come back, I'll talk more about the
Speaker 1: early days of a m D. But first let's take
Speaker 1: another quick break. In two, a m D made the
Speaker 1: move to become a publicly traded company and held a
Speaker 1: night po Chairs of a m D were valued at
Speaker 1: fifteen dollars each. The following year, it would open its
Speaker 1: first overseas manufacturing facility in Malaysia. So the company was
Speaker 1: expanding early on, and the company continued to manufacture components
Speaker 1: and grow, And that's pretty much what the company did
Speaker 1: for its first few years, building logic chips, growing the company.
Speaker 1: And there's not really much to say about those years
Speaker 1: apart from the fact that Sanders established himself as a
Speaker 1: bit of a flamboyant leader. He had already been seen
Speaker 1: as similar in uh fair Child, and I read in
Speaker 1: an Ours Technica article that Francis fran Barton, who was
Speaker 1: the chief financial officer at a m D in the
Speaker 1: late nineties, described Sanders as being part Indiana Jones, part
Speaker 1: don Keyxote. So that's pretty darn flamboyant. Now, Uh. I
Speaker 1: do want to say that if I were to cover
Speaker 1: every single thing they ever put out, this would sound
Speaker 1: like a technical manual and all the names are a
Speaker 1: M and then a bunch of numbers that would become
Speaker 1: unmanageable right away. So I'm going to be skipping around
Speaker 1: a little bit. So by the spring of nineteen seventy four,
Speaker 1: five years after the company had started, it had grown
Speaker 1: to just under fift employees. A m D also reinvested
Speaker 1: in its manufacturing facilities, which is a necessary and critical
Speaker 1: part of the semiconductor business. Gordon Moore, you know, that
Speaker 1: guy who used to work at Fairchild and then became
Speaker 1: a co founder of Intel, had famously made an observation
Speaker 1: back in nineteen sixty five that market demands would create
Speaker 1: the incentive for semiconductor companies to cram about twice as
Speaker 1: many components onto a square inch silicon chip every two
Speaker 1: years or so. To meet that demand, companies like Intel
Speaker 1: and A m D had to frequently overhaul not just
Speaker 1: the design of the chips, but the manufacturing process itself
Speaker 1: to create ever smaller transistors and pathways in order to
Speaker 1: stay true to that observation. Today we call that observation
Speaker 1: Moore's law, though these days we tend to think of
Speaker 1: it in terms of computing power, and how computing power
Speaker 1: tends to double and strength every eighteen to twenty four months,
Speaker 1: as if it were magically doing that on its own.
Speaker 1: The Gordon Moore's point was that there was going to
Speaker 1: be a continuing demand from the marketplace for ever smaller
Speaker 1: components on microchips, which in turn also means that the
Speaker 1: microchips are able to do a lot more stuff because
Speaker 1: you've crammed more components onto it than the previous generations microchips,
Speaker 1: and that as long as that market demand is there,
Speaker 1: then it would create the incentive to continue investing in that.
Speaker 1: So his was a market driven vision. We tend to
Speaker 1: think of it as some sort of innovation law, but
Speaker 1: that means that's sort of like getting it backwards anyway.
Speaker 1: Even in those days, a m D and Intel were competing.
Speaker 1: While Intel had started to develop computers on a chip
Speaker 1: in the early nineteen seventies, releasing the Intel four zero
Speaker 1: zero four micro processor back in nineteen seventy one, it
Speaker 1: was also still the business of building logic chips, and
Speaker 1: a m D sales for certain products we're starting to
Speaker 1: catch up to and in some cases exceed Intel sales,
Speaker 1: So things were looking good for a m D. Jerry
Speaker 1: Sanders initiated a special program called Run for the Sun
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy five. This was a sales target for
Speaker 1: a m D. The sales target was to make ninety
Speaker 1: three million dollars in sales that year, So why ninety
Speaker 1: three million dollars, Well, that would be one dollar for
Speaker 1: every mile between the Earth and the Sun, and Sanders
Speaker 1: again had a certain flair for the dramatic. By the way,
Speaker 1: A m D would very nearly make that goal. They
Speaker 1: came up less than a million dollars short of that figure.
Speaker 1: Really impressive considering where they were. But I guess that
Speaker 1: means they didn't burn up on the surface of the Sun,
Speaker 1: so that's good. Also, in nine, A m D did
Speaker 1: something pretty clever. Engineers took a very close look at
Speaker 1: a photograph of the die that Intel was using to
Speaker 1: build the company's A D eight eight bit microprocessor. So
Speaker 1: the microprocessor was called the eight and it was an
Speaker 1: eight bit microprocessor. Am D looks at this their engineers.
Speaker 1: They start to set out to reverse engineer Intel's work
Speaker 1: and make their own version of Intel's chip, So a
Speaker 1: m D S version would ultimately be called the a
Speaker 1: M nine D e D. Now you might imagine that
Speaker 1: Intel was pretty head up about the fact that A
Speaker 1: m D had managed to figure out their secret sauce
Speaker 1: and then reverse engineer it to create their own variation
Speaker 1: of Intel's chip. But what actually unfolded was one of
Speaker 1: the more unusual business deals in tech history, in Intel
Speaker 1: and A m D entered into a cross licensing agreement
Speaker 1: between the two companies. This initial agreement had to do
Speaker 1: with microcode, which is the code on top of a
Speaker 1: CPU that allows it to interact with the computer's other systems,
Speaker 1: and it gets pretty complicated both logically and legally. But
Speaker 1: an interesting thing to point out is that A m
Speaker 1: D and Intel, without while they were still being fiercely
Speaker 1: competitive against each other and even engaging in lengthy and
Speaker 1: acrimonious legal battles over their history, would continue to renew
Speaker 1: patent licensing agreements every decade because they were set to
Speaker 1: expire after ten years. While in nineteen seventy seven, A
Speaker 1: m D and the German company Siemens entered and do
Speaker 1: a joint venture to develop micro computers. Those are the
Speaker 1: type of computers we think of as desktop personal computers
Speaker 1: in other words, Now together the companies formed a third
Speaker 1: entity called Advanced micro Computers, and they established it both
Speaker 1: in the United States and in Germany. The main focus
Speaker 1: was to create computers that had a dialog Z eight
Speaker 1: thousand micro processor as the CPU. A m D was
Speaker 1: actually a second source for those type of chips. Now,
Speaker 1: that means that a m D had acquired a license
Speaker 1: from Zilog to produce Xilogs chips using Zalogs designs. So
Speaker 1: it's it's as if you, let's say that you make
Speaker 1: a soft drink like Coca Cola, and then Pepsi comes
Speaker 1: up to you and says, hey, we can't meet our demand.
Speaker 1: We have way more demand for our product than we
Speaker 1: can personally manufacture, so we are willing to strike a
Speaker 1: deal with you where you can make our stuff and
Speaker 1: sell it because the demand is there, and you'll pay
Speaker 1: us a little licensing fee so that we get some
Speaker 1: money out of this. But that way we meet our
Speaker 1: customer demands and you make money and I make money.
Speaker 1: And that's sort of the idea that a m D
Speaker 1: had with Zilog, where they were allowed to produce Zilog
Speaker 1: chips in return for this licensing fee. Now, before long
Speaker 1: it became clear that Siemens and a m D had
Speaker 1: very different visions of where advanced micro computers should go.
Speaker 1: And in nineteen seventy nine, just two years after entering
Speaker 1: into the joint venture, a m D would buy out
Speaker 1: Siemens stake in that company, and A m D would
Speaker 1: continue to operate advanced micro computers for a short while,
Speaker 1: but would choose to shut it down in N one
Speaker 1: because of another big opportunity. Then, opportunity came straight from
Speaker 1: their old nemesis, Intel. In the nineteen seventies, Intel had
Speaker 1: developed the eight six microprocessor and by extension, what has
Speaker 1: become known as the X eight six instruction set architecture.
Speaker 1: This was a significant advancement over Intel's eight bit processor,
Speaker 1: the D eight that was the one that A m
Speaker 1: D had managed to reverse engineer and effectively clone a
Speaker 1: couple of years earlier. The eight six microprocessor was a
Speaker 1: top candidate when another tech giant, IBM, was looking at
Speaker 1: microprocessors that might power its upcoming IBM PC. But Big
Speaker 1: Blue had a concern. IBM was worried that the demand
Speaker 1: for the IBM PC would quickly exceed Intel's manufacturing capacity,
Speaker 1: and that would result in shortages and delays in the
Speaker 1: supply chain, which in turn would make IBMS customers unhappy. Plus,
Speaker 1: if something should happen to Intel, then IBM would be
Speaker 1: up the creek as far as its computers were concerned.
Speaker 1: They'd have no supplier for their microprocessors. So IBM essentially
Speaker 1: told Intel, hey, we can make a deal, and it's
Speaker 1: going to be a big one, you know, make you
Speaker 1: lots of money, but you have to figure out how
Speaker 1: to license your technology to another manufacturer so that we
Speaker 1: can get the number of chips we need to meet
Speaker 1: our demand. Intel, not wanting to lose this valuable contract,
Speaker 1: agreed to IBMS terms and then turned to a m D.
Speaker 1: Thus Intel an a m D entered into an agreement.
Speaker 1: Intel would supply a m D with the proprietary information
Speaker 1: about how the eight six and by extension, the x
Speaker 1: A D six instruction set architecture worked, and a m
Speaker 1: D would start producing some of Intel's chips, and the
Speaker 1: two competitors joined forces to meet IBMS expectations. Now, in
Speaker 1: another episode, I talked about how IBM's decision to rely
Speaker 1: heavily on off the shelf components would lead to its
Speaker 1: eventual departure from the personal computer market because other companies
Speaker 1: would replicate IBM computers by getting hold of those same
Speaker 1: basic components and putting them together themselves. And part of
Speaker 1: that had to do with Intel and a m D
Speaker 1: not having to sign any sort of exclusive deal with IBM,
Speaker 1: So not only did these companies make a killing off IBM,
Speaker 1: they also benefited from all the IBM compatible manufacturers that
Speaker 1: grew out of that era, and both Intel and A
Speaker 1: M D were raking in the cash. Intel would continue
Speaker 1: to supply A M D with database tapes for the
Speaker 1: design of the six, the six, and the A D
Speaker 1: two eighty six, which gave A D the ability to
Speaker 1: make clones of those chips, plus the variants like the
Speaker 1: eight and thee Those were variations on the x A
Speaker 1: D six architecture. Now A and D did not put
Speaker 1: all its eggs in the Intel second source basket. It
Speaker 1: was also developing chips for RISK computers. RISK or r
Speaker 1: I s C stands for reduced instruction set computer. It
Speaker 1: relies on a processor design that follows a simplified set
Speaker 1: of instructions, and it's an alternative to complex instruction set
Speaker 1: computing or c I s C. The idea of r
Speaker 1: I s C computers is that they do fewer things,
Speaker 1: but the things they do they can do much more
Speaker 1: quickly and efficiently. The power PC microprocessor architecture, which was
Speaker 1: a joint venture between Apple, IBM, and Motorola, relied on
Speaker 1: risk chips. The A M D line was known as
Speaker 1: the A M twenty nine thousand series. So in nine three,
Speaker 1: A M D ruffled the feathers over at Intel a
Speaker 1: little bit. The company produced it's a M two eighty
Speaker 1: six licensed clone of Intel's eight two eighties six, And
Speaker 1: typically we just refer to these as two eighty six
Speaker 1: microchips or two eighty six computers. It's really saying that
Speaker 1: the computer, which was an IBM compatible computer had inside
Speaker 1: of it an A D two eighty six microchip or
Speaker 1: a M D S version. So the fact that A
Speaker 1: M D was making this chip totally fine. That was
Speaker 1: completely covered under this licensing agreement between the two companies.
Speaker 1: That was not the problem. A M D was doing
Speaker 1: exactly what it was supposed to be doing. It was
Speaker 1: taking Intel's chips, and it was making them and making
Speaker 1: them available to these UH manufacturers that are making the
Speaker 1: actual computers. The two chips were identical from an architectural perspective,
Speaker 1: but a M D S version had a higher clock speed.
Speaker 1: Intel's clock speed for the two eighty six topped out
Speaker 1: at twelve point five Mega hurts, and a M D
Speaker 1: S could go up as high as twenty mega hurts.
Speaker 1: So that raises the question what are clock speeds? So
Speaker 1: let me answer that very quickly. With a processor, the
Speaker 1: clock tells us essentially how many internal operations the microprocessor
Speaker 1: can perform each second, and we describe this in cycles
Speaker 1: per second, and a HURTS is one cycle per second.
Speaker 1: So Intel's two eight six microprocessor could complete twelve and
Speaker 1: a half million cycles every second, but a m D
Speaker 1: S could do twenty million cycles every second. So a
Speaker 1: m D S chip was able to process information at
Speaker 1: a faster rate than Intel's which led the industry to
Speaker 1: say that a m D was effectively producing better Intel
Speaker 1: chips than Intel could, and as you can imagine, that
Speaker 1: didn't go over so well at Intel. Intel did not
Speaker 1: want to see companies going with their competitors version of
Speaker 1: their own chip instead of them. But things were going
Speaker 1: great at a m D. The company was named one
Speaker 1: of the Fortune five hundred companies in nineteen eighty five.
Speaker 1: Tony Holbrook would become the president of the company in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty six, and Jerry Sanders would turn into the CEO,
Speaker 1: not turn into he was just that was his role.
Speaker 1: Didn't have a magic fairy come down and Grant him
Speaker 1: the wish of becoming CEO those some days. I think
Speaker 1: that's how business works. Also, in nineteen eighty six, Intel
Speaker 1: terminated their contract with a m D, which was problematic
Speaker 1: as the second source deal between the two companies that
Speaker 1: that had started back in nineteen eighty two, and it
Speaker 1: was supposed to last ten years. But if I'm doing
Speaker 1: my math correctly, two plus ten does not equal nineteen
Speaker 1: eight six. So I guess Intel wasn't too happy with
Speaker 1: getting a reputation for making the second best Intel microchip
Speaker 1: in the industry, and the company was gearing up with
Speaker 1: its three eight six update. So Intel said no dice
Speaker 1: to a m D, and a m D sued, alleging
Speaker 1: that Intel had breached the contract. But these legal battles
Speaker 1: take time. This particular legal battle would take almost ten years,
Speaker 1: and in the meantime am D had to figure out
Speaker 1: what else it had to do. That what else would
Speaker 1: end up being up two pronged attack. One would be
Speaker 1: to develop their own CPUs, actually designing their own microchip
Speaker 1: architecture from the ground up based on the x A
Speaker 1: D six instruction set. The other prong of this two
Speaker 1: pronged attack was to look at what Intel was doing
Speaker 1: and reverse engineer it again and maybe even do it
Speaker 1: better than Intel could again. So in our next episode
Speaker 1: we'll talk about this two pronged attack and what a
Speaker 1: m D did and how it continued to evolve and
Speaker 1: what's going on with the company today. But this is
Speaker 1: time to wrap up this particular episode, So thank you
Speaker 1: so much for the suggestion. Greatly appreciate it. If any
Speaker 1: of you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech
Speaker 1: Stuff episodes, you can write me the addresses tech Stuff
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com. You can drop on
Speaker 1: by the website that's tech stuff podcast dot com. You're
Speaker 1: gonna find an archive of all of our shows there,
Speaker 1: plus links to the social uh presence of tech Stuff
Speaker 1: and to our online store, where every purchase you make
Speaker 1: goes to help the show. We greatly appreciate it, and
Speaker 1: I will talk to you again about a m D
Speaker 1: really soon. Tex Stuff is a production of I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows.