{"id":717,"date":"2026-09-06T15:53:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-06T18:53:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/2026\/09\/a-historia-da-amd\/"},"modified":"2026-09-06T16:00:38","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T19:00:38","slug":"a-historia-da-amd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/2026\/09\/a-historia-da-amd\/","title":{"rendered":"The History of AMD"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A<\/p>\n

No technology company has died and been reborn as many times as AMD. Founded in 1969 to live in Intel\u2019s shadow, it spent five decades alternating strokes of genius (Athlon, x86-64, Zen) with brushes with disaster \u2014 until an engineer named Lisa Su turned a US$ 2 stock into the greatest turnaround in semiconductor history. This is AMD\u2019s story, with dates and scars.<\/p>\n

1969: eight men and a second-source plan<\/h2>\n

In 1\u00ba of May, 1969<\/strong>, Jerry Sanders<\/strong> \u2014 Fairchild Semiconductor\u2019s most charismatic salesman \u2014 founded Advanced Micro Devices with seven colleagues. While Intel, founded by Fairchild alumni Noyce and Moore, was born awash in capital, Sanders struggled to raise money. The initial strategy was humble and smart: be a second source<\/strong> for other companies\u2019 chips, manufacturing their designs with better quality.<\/p>\n

1982: the contract that defined everything<\/h2>\n

When IBM chose the Intel 8088 for its PC, it demanded a second source of supply. The result: in 1982<\/strong>, Intel was forced to license x86 to AMD. The forced marriage soured quickly \u2014 in 1987<\/strong> Intel cut off access to the 386, and the two plunged into eight years of legal warfare<\/strong> ending in 1995 with AMD securing the right to make its own x86 chip designs. Meanwhile, the Am386<\/strong> (1991) and Am486 sold millions by cloning Intel\u2019s performance for less.<\/p>\n

1999\u20132003: Athlon and the x86-64 masterstroke<\/h2>\n

With the Athlon (K7, 1999)<\/strong> \u2014 a project led by Dirk Meyer, a DEC Alpha veteran \u2014 AMD did the unthinkable: it surpassed Intel in performance, and in 2000 reached the first GHz<\/strong> in consumer processor history, days before its rival. The next blow was even bigger: while Intel bet on the incompatible 64-bit Itanium, AMD extended x86 to 64 bits while maintaining full compatibility. The Opteron and Athlon 64 (2003)<\/strong> won so clearly that Intel had to swallow its pride and license AMD64<\/strong> \u2014 to this day, every 64-bit x86 processor on the planet, including Intel\u2019s, runs AMD\u2019s architecture (the x86_64<\/code> in your uname -m<\/code>).<\/p>\n

2006\u20132012: ATI, Bulldozer, and the edge of the abyss<\/h2>\n

In 2006<\/strong>, AMD paid US$ 5,4 billion for ATI<\/strong> \u2014 too much, at the wrong time. In debt, it stumbled on architectures (Barcelona\u2019s delay, the fiasco of Bulldozer in 2011<\/strong>) while Intel got it right with Core. In 2009<\/strong>, it sold its own factories (giving birth to GlobalFoundries) to survive. In 2012<\/strong>, its stock was worth about US$ 2<\/strong> and analysts were writing obituaries. Ironically, the ATI acquisition would plant the seeds of salvation: APUs secured the contracts for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One (2013)<\/strong> \u2014 the cash that kept the lights on.<\/p>\n

2014: Lisa Su arrives<\/h2>\n

In October 2014<\/strong>, engineer Lisa Su<\/strong> (an MIT PhD and IBM veteran) took charge with a plan simple to state and brutal to execute: bet everything on a new architecture. The result was Zen<\/strong>: the Ryzen<\/strong> processors arrived in 2017<\/strong> with an IPC gain of about 52% over the previous generation, and EPYC<\/strong> invaded servers. In 2019<\/strong>, Zen 2 brought the design of chiplets<\/strong> on TSMC\u2019s 7nm process \u2014 modularity that Intel, stuck with its own delayed factories, could not answer.<\/p>\n

2020\u20132026: the complete turnaround<\/h2>\n

The numbers tell the turnaround story: in 2022<\/strong> AMD bought Xilinx for US$ 49 billion<\/strong> (the FPGA leader) and surpassed Intel in market capitalization<\/strong> for the first time. The Steam Deck<\/strong> runs an AMD APU under Linux; PS5 and Xbox Series remain on the red team; and the MI300X (2023)<\/strong> put the company in the AI accelerator race \u2014 a difficult fight, as we analyzed in the post AMD vs NVIDIA and the CUDA moat<\/a>: the hardware wins on paper, but its rival\u2019s software still dictates the market.<\/p>\n

AMD and Linux: best friends<\/h2>\n

While NVIDIA has historically clashed with the kernel, AMD took the opposite path: the amdgpu<\/strong> driver is open source and lives inside the kernel (it is routinely the largest block of code in each release, as in 7.3<\/a>), Mesa\/RADV delivers top-tier Vulkan, and ROCm is open. The result: for Linux gaming \u2014 from Steam Deck to desktop \u2014 the community\u2019s default recommendation is a red-team card.<\/p>\n

Timeline<\/h2>\n