5 Things You Didn't Know About AMD.

(Image above shows AMD’s current CEO: Lisa T. Su, Image source: extremetech.com)

AMD’s Shares have completely crushed the market recently, soaring 366% higher within the last fifty-two weeks. you'll grasp the corporate as the never-ending foil to Intel within the marketplace for computer processors, and AMD's duels with NVIDIA  within the graphics chip sector also are the stuff of legend.
The company at this time shows negative profits however positive money flow and management hopes to have found a path back to sustainable black ink on the bottom line. Analysts tend to agree, painting an image of healthy sales growth with an aspect of positive and rising profits over ensuing 2 years.
That's a snap of AMD's headline news. Here's one or two of facts which may be strange to several AMD investors.

1. From youth to the golden age

One year after Intel's founding fathers left Fairchild Semiconductor to start out their own pioneering business, AMD's founders followed suit. Eight former Fairchild engineers and executives struck out on their own, below the helm of business executive Boche Sanders. AMD shares started merchandising on the big board exchange in 1979.
Just 3 years at that time, IBM (NYSE: IBM) reached bent secure a second supply of processors for its recently launched computer systems. Working under an Intel license for x86 technologies, this became AMD's mainstay business for the next 35 years.
AMD's K5 and K6 processors were putting significant pressure on Intel's PC market stature during 1995. The chips offered competitive performance at a much lower price point, forcing Intel to adjust its own pricing strategies.
In 1997, AMD presented its first Athlon processor. The company introduced many industry-first innovations over the next few years, like the first 64-bit x86 processor, the first dual-core PC processor, and the energy-saving PowerNow! and Cool'n'Quiet technologies. These were the days where AMD had Intel paying defense, catching up to AMD's innovations rather than the other way around.

2. Back to engineering 101

For the first 33 years of AMD, Jerry Sanders led the company as CEO. On his retirement, the executive suite saw a flurry of four new CEOs in 12 years.
The very now present CEO of AMD “Lisa Su” has put company’s focus on more technical and innovative side which is kickstarting AMD and after Release of Ryzen Processors AMD hit the market with its AMD Ryzen 7 1800X Series, man I love that processor. But AMD’s former CEO’s were lacking on this one, they were not focusing on innovation. During her doctorate work in electrical engineering at MIT, she advanced the idea of silicon-on-insulator chip-building technologies that AMD uses today.
After wearing the cap of being CEO in 2014, Su quickly established a new company strategy with a heavy focus on developing new technology to address growing markets. She had been pushing for such changes from the senior VP level, starting in 2012. Five years ago, AMD’s 90% Products were directed towards by use in PCs. Su wants about half of her company's revenue to come from wider computing markets such as Gaming industry and embedded systems and had reached a 60-40 split between PC and similar innovative technology sales by 2015.

3. AMD is not a chipmaker

Once upon a time, AMD built its own microprocessors in company-owned factories. A long-standing manufacturing research partnership with IBM helped to keep those chipmaking operations going. But things have changed.
Investment groups from Abu Dhabi started building ownership in AMD in 2007, and right at the darkest days of the 2008 financial crisis, that relationship led to AMD's manufacturing operations spinning off into a joint venture called GlobalFoundries. While the rest of the world seemed stopped in its financial tracks, AMD shares surged 30% in a single day on this news.
GlobalFoundries still counts AMD as its largest customer, but now operates as a completely separate business with plenty of supply contracts with other chip designers.
The manufacturing spinoff gave AMD a fighting chance to survive as Intel retook its throne while market conditions started to shift away from PC systems. The balance sheet lightened immensely when the GlobalFoundries separation closed in 2010.
AMD used the funds from that deal to pay down debt balances, and annual interest payments took a deep dive. Without the GlobalFoundries transaction, AMD probably wouldn't have survived this far. So AMD is now a fabless chip designer, and at an advantage for it.

4. Stock moves

AMD was a member of the S&P five hundred index back within the Athlon-and-K6 blossom. The stock was born from that prestigious index in 2013 owing to a plunging market cap, falling back to the lesser S&P MidCap four hundred index instead.
As of March 2017, AMD is back to the massive leagues. The stock replaced crumbling distributor Urban Outfitters before the gap bell on March twenty. At the time, AMD investors might reminisce at annual share worth gains of 390% whereas Urban Outfitters suffered a half-hour haircut over the constant amount.
Lisa Su is one amongst simply thirty feminine CEOs among the five hundred index members nowadays. that is up from twenty-three feminine leaders 2 years alone, however, the S&P five hundred club continues to be few model of gender equality.
In the different stock-related news, AMD spent thirty-three years on any exchange before jumping to the information system exchange in Dec 2014. Then-CFO Devinder Kumar represented the move as some way to align the corporate a lot of closely with different technology businesses on its exchange, and conjointly to produce higher lines of communication with investors. however the big board charges considerably higher listing fees than the information system, and AMD will use each penny of cost-cutting it will get -- particularly once the business of developing and merchandising PC chips does not suffer from the modification.

5. AMD's initial ARM chips

The company has worked strictly among the Intel-compatible x86 world for many years, supplemented by graphics processors. competitive processor architectures from ARM Holdings -- currently an area of the SoftBank cluster -- were continually a lot of-of a threat than a chance.
That began to modification in 2012.
AMD secured a license to style associated with the ARM-based processor, straight off inserted ARM-based solutions to handle security tasks in mobile processors, and declared that ARM-style server chips would be cut from whole AMD fabric as shortly as 2014. Of course, Lisa Su was on stage for that announcement in her capability as world merchandise manager at the time. Her fingerprints square measure everywhere this project.
It took to a small degree longer than that, however, AMD did so launch its initial ARM-powered server processor in 2016.
The AMD Opteron A1100 puts eight high-end ARM cores along with enterprise options like integral high-speed networking, quick access to system knowledge via eight PCI-Express lanes, and support for big quantities of DDR4 memory with error correction. it is a new system-building choice for server makers, providing low power consumption and a performance profile tuned for managing large amounts of knowledge transfer. The target market here is cloud-based storage platforms, {and the|and therefore the|and conjointly the} Opteron A1100 series also works well because of the storage management element of a multisystem massive knowledge analysis answer.