Compared with the legend of Intel's founding, AMD's beginning seems a bit less noble, but it is also a special experience in a specific historical background and cannot be replicated again.Exactly 50 years ago, AMD's first CPU processor was born, which was the AM9080.What is controversial about it is that it is not designed independently, but cloned through reverse engineering research on the Intel 8080 processor.
AMD AM9080
According to Wikipedia,On their last day of work at Xerox in the summer of 1973, Ashawna Hailey, Kim Hailey, and Jay Kumar took high-definition photos of Intel 8080 pre-production samples, a total of 400 photos.
They used these photos to draw schematics and logic diagrams of the chip, and promoted them around Silicon Valley, hoping to find interested partners.
In the end, AMD accepted their proposal because AMD found that this processor was very suitable for the N-channel MOS process it had just developed.
There is a message showing,In 1974, when Intel 8080 was just born, AMD quickly produced and sold the first batch of AM9080, but its large-scale mass production and commercialization was only in 1975, half a century ago.
Everyone should have seen it,The AM9080 is very interestingly named, very similar to the Intel 8080 but numerically larger.
In the following decades, AMD played this trick many times. For example, Intel processors were called Core i7, i5, and i3, and AMD processors were called A8, A6, A4...
The most amazing thing is,The production cost of AMD AM9080 is only 50 cents, and each wafer can produce up to 100 wafers, but the price sold to the U.S. military is as high as $700.——The U.S. military has been purchasing goods at sky-high prices for a long time...
It can be said that this made a great contribution to AMD’s early accumulation.
Intel 8080
It stands to reason that this is a serious commercial violation for AMD, but it is actually a good thing becauseCustomers who purchase Intel processors in large quantities need a "second supplier" to prevent monopoly, such as IBM, such as the US military, AMD took the opportunity to reach a cross-licensing agreement with Intel and became a legitimate "second supplier."
For this reason, AMD paid Intel a licensing fee of 25,000 yuan that year, and 75,000 US dollars per year thereafter, and gave up all responsibilities related to earlier mutual infringements.
But it must be admitted that AMD was not just plagiarizing at the time, it was also quite powerful.
The AMD N-channel MOS process is more advanced and compact, which makes the AM9080 chip smaller and therefore lower cost.
Just like today, more advanced processes bring higher performance,The frequency of AM9080 reaches a maximum of 4MHz (the minimum is 2.083MHz), while the frequency of Intel 8080 is only 3.125MHz.
AM9080 also has many derivative versions, such as the normal temperature version for ordinary customers, which can operate at 0℃ to 70℃; the wide temperature version for the military, which can operate stably from -70℃ to 125℃.
In 1982, Intel and AMD expanded their cooperation agreement, allowing AMD to independently develop x86 architecture processors. The first product launched by AMD was AM286, which was an authorized product of Intel 80286.
The subsequent stories of 386, 486, and Pentium (586) should be familiar to everyone.
AMD AM9080