Essential Linkage: AMD makes a lotta chips, hits a birthday mark, but the future looks shaky.
Birthday celebrations are in order for the big green chip company AMD, as they reach their 40th anniversary and make it a pretty huge amount of time from their initial founding in 1969. Jerry Sanders and a few other people threw their collective will together to found the company, and while the staff have changed the company is very much true to its origins.
To celebrate still being around they're having a competition to win four HP notebooks with AMD's Athlon Neo X2 CPUs; a 1.6GHz low-powered chip that gobbles up very little power and makes a teensy amount of heat. Of course they're doing it in a funny way, making you follow their Twitter feed to be in time to answer AMD-centric questions, but hey - it's free!
Unfortunately for AMD however is that CNET report analysts of the business see it as being on rocky ground financially, with their product share dropping faster than a runaway boulder. Their not-quite-as-competitive notebook processors are to blame (compared to Intel's Atom anyway), and their Phenom II CPUs are also not quite as attractive compared to Core i7 and even Core 2 Duo.
We're happy enough to still have AMD around, and their graphics brand ATI is still going forwards on all cylinders, so we raise a glass to the next (hopeful) forty years for AMD. Check out their birthday announcement over at their website, and drool at the moist chocolatey cake they've got pictured there.
Issue: 111 | April, 2010