Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., usually known as AMD, is a semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California. It designs processors, graphics products, adaptive computing devices and related technologies for personal computers, servers, embedded systems, gaming and artificial intelligence workloads.
AMD is a fabless or mostly outsourced semiconductor company: it designs chips and platforms, while manufacturing is handled by external foundry partners.
Products
AMD product families include Ryzen processors for consumer PCs, EPYC processors for servers, Radeon graphics products, AMD Instinct accelerators, Threadripper workstation processors, embedded processors, adaptive SoCs and FPGAs.
AMD's product portfolio expanded after its 2006 acquisition of ATI Technologies, which brought Radeon graphics into the company. The 2022 acquisition of Xilinx expanded AMD's adaptive computing and FPGA business.
Markets
AMD serves several markets, including client PCs, gaming, data centres, embedded computing, professional visualisation and AI acceleration. Its products are used in desktops, laptops, workstations, servers, games consoles and specialist embedded devices.
The company competes with firms such as Intel in CPUs and Nvidia in graphics and AI acceleration, although the competitive picture varies by market and product generation.
History
AMD was founded in 1969. It initially sold logic and memory products before becoming a major supplier of x86-compatible processors. Later product lines included Am386, Athlon, Opteron, Radeon, Ryzen and EPYC.
The Zen CPU architecture, introduced in the Ryzen era, helped restore AMD's competitiveness in desktop, laptop and server processors.
Open Ecosystem and Software
AMD promotes open standards and publishes software tools for parts of its product stack. Examples include Radeon software, ROCm for accelerated computing and developer tools for adaptive computing products.
Driver quality and software support can vary by product, operating system and workload, so practical performance depends on the specific device, driver branch and application.
See Also
References
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