AMD Celebrates 40 Years

Today officially marks the 40th anniversary for Advanced Micro Devices, and what an exciting forty years it’s been! The company was founded on May 1, 1969, just one year after Intel, and was formed to produce a number of “logic chips”, and believe it or not, they even at one point produced Intel processors, such as the AM286 pictured below.

Their first in-house processor was the K5, a chip that featured 4.3 million transistors built on a 500nm process, 8KB+16KB Cache and a clock-rate up to 100MHz. These chips plugged into either a Socket 5 or Socket 7 motherboard, the latter of which was my first experience with frying a motherboard (hurrah for not properly soldering fan wires!).

If you want to take an exhaustive trip down AMD’s history, I recommend you check out the Wikipedia page on the company. To help celebrate things though, the company is offering up a few different contests in order to repay their fans, and the first is for you to create a quick video (under 60 seconds) with you expressing your love for AMD, and you must say in some manner, “Happy 40th Anniversary AMD”.

Prizes include all of of AMD’s current high-end offerings, such as an X4 Black Edition CPU and ASUS motherboard and also the new budget (but powerful) Athlon 7850. If you’re not camera shy, get to making a video… you may just win!

In our 40 years, users and enthusiasts the world over have been integral in the development and marketplace adoption of our product lines. We’ve always appreciated the feedback and wishes of our customers and end users, and during this anniversary year we’d like to celebrate by saying thanks. So we’re rolling out a series of contests that will take place over the coming months to give back to our dedicated fans, and let you show your AMD spirit. In total we’re giving away 80 prizes, and the winners will take home some of the most innovative products in the market today.