GABAY, STEPHEN ELLY F.

COEPROF 17

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor
company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related
technologies for business and consumer markets. While initially it manufactured its own processors,
the company later outsourced its manufacturing, a practice known as fabless, after Global
Foundries was spun off in 2009. AMD's main products
include microprocessors, motherboard chipsets, embedded processors and graphics
processors for servers, workstations and personal computers, and embedded systems applications.
AMD is the second-largest supplier and only significant rival to Intel in the market for x86-
based microprocessors. Since acquiring ATI in 2006, AMD and its competitor Nvidia have
maintained a duopoly in the discrete Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) market. However, that can
change in the future as Intel has implied their entry into the market by 2020.
Advanced Micro Devices was formally incorporated on May 1, 1969, by Jerry Sanders, along
with seven of his colleagues from Fairchild Semiconductor. Sanders, an electrical engineer who was
the director of marketing at Fairchild, had, like many Fairchild executives, grown frustrated with the
increasing lack of support, opportunity, and flexibility within the company, and decided to leave to
start his own semiconductor company. The previous year Robert Noyce, who had invented the first
practical integrated circuit or the microchip in 1959 at Fairchild, had left Fairchild together
with Gordon Moore and founded the semiconductor company Intel in July 1968.
In September 1969, AMD moved from its temporary location in Santa Clara to Sunnyvale,
California. To immediately secure a customer base, AMD initially became a second source supplier
of microchips designed by Fairchild and National Semiconductor. AMD first focused on producing
logic chips. The company guaranteed quality control to United States Military Standard, an
advantage in the early computer industry since unreliability in microchips was a distinct problem that
customers – including computer manufacturers, the telecommunications industry, and instrument
manufacturers – wanted to avoid.
In November 1969, the company manufactured its first product, the Am9300, a 4-bit MSI shift
register, which began selling in 1970. Also in 1970, AMD produced its first proprietary product, the
Am2501 logic counter, which was highly successful. Its best-selling product in 1971 was the
Am2505, the fastest multiplier available.
In 1971, AMD entered the RAM chip market, beginning with the Am3101, a 64-bit bipolar
RAM. That year AMD also greatly increased the sales volume of its linear integrated circuits, and by
year end the company's total annual sales reached $4.6 million.
AMD went public in September 1972. The company was a second source for
Intel MOS/LSI circuits by 1973, with products such as Am14/1506 and Am14/1507, dual 100-bit
dynamic shift registers. By 1975, AMD was producing 212 products – of which 49 were proprietary,
including the Am9102 (a static N-channel 1024-bit RAM) and three low-power Schottky MSI circuits:
Am25LS07, Am25LS08, and Am25LS09.
Intel had created the first microprocessor, its 4-bit 4004, in 1971. By 1975, AMD entered the
microprocessor market with the Am9080, a reverse-engineered clone of the Intel 8080, and
the Am2900 bit-slice microprocessor family. When Intel began installing microcode in its
microprocessors in 1976, it entered into a cross-licensing agreement with AMD, granting AMD a
copyright license to the microcode in its microprocessors and peripherals, effective October 1976.
In 1977, AMD entered into a joint venture with Siemens, a German engineering
conglomerate wishing to enhance its technology expertise and enter the U.S. market. Siemens
purchased 20% of AMD's stock, giving AMD an infusion of cash to increase its product lines. That
year the two companies also jointly established Advanced Micro Computers, located in Silicon Valley
and in Germany, giving AMD an opportunity to enter the microcomputer development and
manufacturing field, in particular based on AMD's second-
source Zilog Z8000 microprocessors. When the two companies' vision for Advanced Micro
Computers diverged, AMD bought out Siemens' stake in the U.S. division in 1979. AMD closed its
Advanced Micro Computers subsidiary in late 1981, after switching focus to manufacturing second-
source Intel x86 microprocessors.
INTEL CORE i9 MICROPROCESSOR
Intel Core i9 microprocessors were introduced in May 2017. With their high number of
cores, high power draw, high thermal output, high performance, and unique desktop socket, LGA
2066, they are intended to be used by enthusiasts. A mobile version based on the standard
BGA1440 socket was released in 2018, featuring six hyperthreaded cores and 12 MB of cache. It
has been proven to attain 5 gigahertz under ideal conditions.[4] It is rumored that the next generation
of Intel CPUs will feature the Core i9 9900K, an eight-core hyperthreaded processor, while the Core
i7 9700K will also feature eight cores without hyperthreading. Up till the end of 2018, the top-end
model have 18 cores.

DESKTOP PROCESSORS
"Skylake-X" (14 nm)

"Coffee Lake-S" (14 nm)

"Coffee Lake-H" (14 nm)

 No support for AVX-512

 Unlocked multiplier on HK models allows overclocking.
 First Intel processor with Thermal Velocity Boost, at or below 50C CPU temperature
the processor can boost to 4.8 GHz.
LATEST MICROCONTROLLER DESIGNS AND APPLICATIONS
IoT-targeted MCUs

“New or established, every semiconductor vendor needs a new paradigm to solve four
critical issues in the Internet of Things (IoT), namely, design time, differentiation, time to
revenue and design cost,” explains Alexandru Voica, senior technology specialist,
Imagination Technologies, in an interview with EFY. He adds that, in the IoT market,
consumers have high expectations; devices need to be affordable, power-efficient and must
work out-of-the-box.
IoT-targeted MCUs look mostly at network connectivity in the form of wired (Ethernet) or
wireless (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or others), lower power and a wide range of sensors like
temperature, motion or humidity.
T. Anand, managing director, Knewron, says, “I would bet mostly on addition of
communication standards like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). An upcoming chip
from Espressif Systems has both Wi-Fi and BLE put together in one system on chip (SoC),
ESP32, which could be another game-changer.”

Ingenic M200 is another good example of an innovative SoC built from the ground up for
wearable devices. It implements a power-saving hardware architecture where a high-
performance microprocessor without interlocked pipeline stages, having a central
processing unit (CPU) clocked at 1.2GHz, tackles most of the heavy-lifting, while less-
demanding tasks are handled by a secondary low-power 300MHz MIPS CPU.
Besides the usual migration to higher-density technology node (90nm and beyond) to
deliver more features, last year memories and computing power in the same or smaller die
area (following Moore’s Law) also saw the first ARM Cortex M7 core product as well as
the first low-power ARM Cortex M4 as a mix of low power consumption and power-
processing performances. This suits perfectly the new wave of wearable products’
requirements, according to Franck Martins, MCU marketing and application, senior
manager, GC&SA region at ST Microelectronics.
However, Aravind Navada, senior engineering manager, Integrated Systems and
Transceivers Group, Analog Devices, India, has a very different perspective. He says, “In
my opinion, there is no such thing as an IoT-targeted MCU. MCUs in general are an
integral part of IoT use cases. While the IoT encompasses a lot of applications (both
battery-powered and line-powered), MCUs in the future would see integrated
connectivity (both wired and wireless).”
Rise of Type-C
Navaneethan Sundaramoorthy, co-founder and CMO, Uncanny Vision Solutions,
explains that the most exciting feature for him in the last 18 months has been the
introduction of universal serial bus (USB) Type-C interface in MCUs from Cypress,
Texas Instruments, NXP and others. “While USB Type-C has just entered the market in
late 2015, it is going to rapidly reach more than a billion consumers within the next 18
months—starting with smartphones, personal computers and tablets,” he says.
“USB Type-C is the biggest change in USB interface and, as described by many industry
observers, it will soon be the one cable to rule these all. With its ease of use through
reversible connections, higher power-carrying capability and flexibility to carry multiple
types of data (video, USB, etc), it is going to pervade lots of electronics,” Sundaramoorthy
adds.

Packing high-end performance

Baikal-T1 processor is the first Russian offering for the communications market to use a
MIPS P-class Warrior CPU, boasting highly-competitive properties in terms of
performance, technology node and compatibility.