[The Exiled]

Zapravo su u dosta toga bili ispred svog vremena, do te mjere da određena rješenja konkurencija danas uredno koristi ili ih (chiplet-design + Infinity Fabric) namjerava koristiti:

• AMD began life as a second-source supplier for companies using Intel processors. Companies like IBM didn't want to rely solely on Intel for one of the primary components in their computers, so they licensed AMD to produce versions of processors like the 8088 and 80286. While these CPUs were manufactured by AMD (and, in some cases, AMD was actually able to clock the CPUs higher than their Intel counterparts), almost everything about their designs came from Intel.
  
  
• AMD purchased NexGen in 1995 for $615 million. AMD also picked up NexGen's in-progress CPU, the Nx686. After some difficulties adapting the design for manufacturing in AMD's facilities (rather than the IBM factories for which it had been designed), AMD in 1997 produced a CPU that was competitive with Intel’s Pentium II but which could be inserted into the then-prevalent Socket 7 motherboards used by the original Pentium, allowing for easy in-place upgrades. This CPU was called the K6, and marked a turning point for AMD—it could compete with Intel in both speed and price.
  
  
• The K7 architecture was successful in all the right ways for AMD. It performed well when stacked up to the Intel chips of the day, and its clock speed also scaled upward readily from 500MHz at its introduction all the way up to 2.33GHz by the end of its run. This allowed AMD to take the fight to Intel during the heady days of the MHz race, where ever-increasing clock speeds served the same marketing purpose that ever-inflating CPU core counts do in processors today. The K7 also scored important symbolic wins—AMD was able to beat Intel to market with a 1GHz processor, for example. The K7 certainly made a splash: AMD's net sales soared from $2.5 billion in 1998 to $4.6 billion in 2000.
  
  
• The Opteron's architecture was similar to K7’s but with two key differences. The first was that the CPU incorporated the system’s memory controller into the chip itself, which greatly reduced memory latency (albeit at the cost of some flexibility; new CPUs had to be introduced to take advantage of things like dual-channel memory and faster memory types like DDR2). This showed that AMD saw the benefits of incorporating more capability into the CPU itself.
  
  
• The K8’s biggest benefit for servers, though, was its 64-bit extensions. The extensions enabled AMD’s chips to run 64-bit operating systems that could address more than 4GB of memory at a time, but they didn’t sacrifice compatibility or speed when running then-standard 32-bit operating systems and applications. These extensions would go on to become the industry standard, beating out Intel’s alternate 64-bit Itanium architecture—Intel even licensed the AMD64 extensions for its own compatible x86-64 implementation. (Intel's initial approach could only run x86 code with an immense performance penalty.)
  
  
• The K8 architecture was successful on the desktop in the form of the Athlon 64 lineup, but it was the Opteron server variants that brought AMD real success in the high-margin market.
  By the time Intel introduced dual-core Xeons based on the company's Core architecture in September of 2006, AMD had snapped up an estimated 25 percent of the server market.
  
  
• The first HBM (1 - 2) memory chip was produced by SK Hynix, and the first devices to use HBM were the AMD Fiji GPUs.
  
  
• Zen is an entirely new design, built from the ground up for optimal balance of performance and power capable of covering the entire computing spectrum from fanless notebooks to high-performance desktop computers. Zen was picked by Michael Clark, AMD's senior fellow and lead architect. Zen was picked to represent the balance needed between the various competing aspects of a microprocessor - transistor allocation/die size, clock/frequency restriction, power limitations, and new instructions to implement. The Infinity Fabric (IF) is a system of transmissions and controls that underpin the entire Zen microarchitecture, any graphics microarchitecture, and any other additional accelerators they might add in the future.