Why You Should Consider Purchasing an AMD Product

Joshua Horowitz
Miranda Hansen-Hunt
Humanities
4/27/15
AMD, Advanced Micro Devices, is one of the two main producers of desktop and
laptop grade central processing units, and one of the three major producers of desktop
and laptop grade graphics processing units. They have been in business almost as long as
their main rival in the computer processor market and twenty-four years longer than their
main rival in the graphics card market. They have had a long and storied history, and they
still produce products that range from practically awe-inspiring to complete failures.
They have hit a golden age and lurched into their decline, but even in their declining
status as a company they are still a fine manufacturer.
AMD was incorporated on May 1st, 1969, by seven former colleagues from
Fairchild Semiconductor: Jerry Sanders, along with Ed Turney, John Carey, Sven
Simonsen, Jack Gifford, Frank Botte, Jim Giles, and Larry Stenger. Jerry Sanders,
previously the Director of Marketing at Fairchild, had grown weary of the treatment he
received at Fairchild. So, like Robert Noyce of the previous year, he left to form his own
company.
In September of 1969 AMD moved from its temporary headquarters in Santa
Clara to Sunnyvale, California. In order to gain a foothold in the market for
semiconductors, AMD became a second source supplier for Fairchild and National
Semiconductor by producing their logic chips. AMD was rare in that they guaranteed

quality control up to the United States Military Standard, which was a heavy advantage in
the early electronics market due to the unreliability of other logic chips.
In the November of 1969, AMD developed their first product, the Am9300, a 4-bit
MSI shift register. It began selling in 1970, which was the same year they produced their
first proprietary product, the Am2501 Logic Counter. It was highly successful.
AMD continued to expand into other markets, such as Random-access memory,
central processing units, and solid state drives. When they purchased ATI in 2006, they
also began to produce graphics processing units. Over time, AMDs stake in the market
has steadily decreased, but they still produce popular options in consumer and
professional grade computer systems.
In the modern day, though AMD has lost the position of its perch at the top of the
consumer computer components market, it remains a juggernaut of the industry. It
continues to rival titans such as Intel and Nvidia even though it has lost a significant
chunk of its workforce. AMD has laid off more than two thousand employees in recent
years (Maureen OGara, Ian King). While it is a smaller company with a smaller body of
employees, its business model is more ethical than Intels aggressiveness, or Nvidias
recent false advertising.
AMD now makes a wide range of products, most in direct competition with other
comparable products from other brands. They make Central Processing Units which
compete with the products made by Intel, graphics cards that compete with products from
Nvidia, RAM that competes with dozens of companies, and storage solutions that are
opposed by a similarly large number of businesses.

While most AMD and Nvidia graphics cards have a direct competitor, such as the
R9 290x to the GTX 780ti, there are fluctuations in the effectiveness of the technology.
Sometimes these make the AMD solutions more effective, sometimes they lower their
effectiveness. If you are searching for a better graphics card cost is the biggest deciding
factor. An AMD R9 280x will very rarely perform worse than a Nvidia GTX 770, but at
the time of this writing can cost as much as ninety dollars less.
On the contrary, CPUs made by Intel and CPUs made by AMD are, while both
very effective solutions, effective at different things. While AMD does almost always
dominate the price-to-performance ratio in the GPU and CPU market, there are a
multitude of reasons why one would choose to purchase a non-AMD product. Some
people are more comfortable with the build quality of an Nvidia graphics card, or the
premium performance on an Intel CPU.
In conclusion, even though AMD is an old dog of the tech industry, it is still
capable of performing new tricks, and sometimes even better than the younger businesses
that compete with it for supremacy. An AMD product might not have the green logo that
marks a product from the GTX line, or the blue sticker that tells the world that it has
Intel Inside, but it doesnt need those things. AMD has made due with what expertise
they have, and have left their mark on the industry like no other. While some may argue
that there are better products from other companies, the same argument can be used
against them.
The world of technology is ever-changing, and the reigning product rocks and
tumbles and falls and is replaced more often that not. After all, a two thousand dollar
computer from 1975 is in no way comparable to a two thousand dollar computer from

2015. Opinions change, facts change, and the industry changes with it, but as of April 20,
2015, AMD is a fine company to supply your computer components.

Citations
Rodengen, Jeffrey L. The Spirit of AMD: Advanced Micro Devices. Ft. Lauderdale, FL:
Write Stuff Enterprises, 1998. Print.
Ruiz, Hector, and Lauren Villagran. Slingshot: AMD's Fight to Free an Industry from the
Ruthless Grip of Intel. Austin, TX: Greenleaf Book Group, 2013. Print.
Wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices
AnandTech | Bench - GPU14. RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Apr. 2015.