Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a hardware and fabless company that designs and develops central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), system-on-chip (SoC), and high-performance compute solutions. AMD serves a wide range of business and consumer markets, including gaming, data centers, artificial intelligence (AI), and embedded systems.
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer components and related products for business and consumer markets. It is considered one of the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturers by revenue and ranked in the Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by revenue for nearly a decade, from 2007 to 2016 fiscal years, until it was removed from the ranking in 2018. In 2020, it was reinstated and ranked 45th, being the 7th-largest technology company in the ranking.
The 8086 is a 16-bit microprocessor chip designed by Intel between early 1976 and June 8, 1978, when it was released. The Intel 8088, released July 1, 1979, is a slightly modified chip with an external 8-bit data bus, and is notable as the processor used in the original IBM PC design.
The Intel 386, originally released as the 80386 and later renamed i386, was the first x86 32-bit microprocessor designed by Intel. Pre-production samples of the 386 were released to select developers in 1985, while mass production commenced in 1986. The processor was a significant evolution in the x86 architecture, extending a long line of processors that stretched back to the Intel 8008. The 386 was the central processing unit (CPU) of many workstations and high-end personal computers of the time. The 386 began to fall out of public use starting with the release of the i486 processor in 1989, while in embedded systems the 386 remained in widespread use until Intel finally discontinued it in 2007.
The Intel 486, officially named i486 and also known as 80486, is a microprocessor introduced in 1989. It is a higher-performance follow-up to the Intel 386. It represents the fourth generation of binary compatible CPUs following the 8086 of 1978, the Intel 80286 of 1982, and 1985's i386.
A microprocessor is a computer processor for which the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit (IC), or a small number of ICs. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circuitry required to perform the functions of a computer's central processing unit (CPU). The IC is capable of interpreting and executing program instructions and performing arithmetic operations. The microprocessor is a multipurpose, clock-driven, register-based, digital integrated circuit that accepts binary data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and provides results as output. Microprocessors contain both combinational logic and sequential digital logic, and operate on numbers and symbols represented in the binary number system.
The Pentium is a microprocessor introduced by Intel on March 22, 1993. It is the first CPU using the Pentium brand. Considered the fifth generation in the x86 (8086) compatible line of processors, succeeding the i486, its implementation and microarchitecture was internally called P5.
Cyrix Corporation was a microprocessor developer that was founded in 1988 in Richardson, Texas, as a specialist supplier of floating point units for 286 and 386 microprocessors. The company was founded by Tom Brightman and Jerry Rogers.
Transmeta Corporation was an American fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California. It developed low power x86 compatible microprocessors based on a VLIW core and a software layer called Code Morphing Software.
The VIA C3 is a family of x86 central processing units for personal computers designed by Centaur Technology and sold by VIA Technologies. The different CPU cores are built following the design methodology of Centaur Technology.
The Am386 CPU is a 100%-compatible clone of the Intel 80386 design released by AMD in March 1991. It sold millions of units, positioning AMD as a legitimate competitor to Intel, rather than being merely a second source for x86 CPUs.
Walter Jeremiah Sanders III is an American businessman and engineer who was a co-founder and long-time CEO of the American semiconductor manufacturer Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), serving in the position from 1969 to 2002.
Busicom Co., Ltd. was a Japanese company that manufactured and sold computer-related products headquartered in Taito, Tokyo. It owned the rights to Intel's first microprocessor, the Intel 4004, which they created in partnership with Intel in 1970.
In electronic design, a semiconductor intellectual property core, IP core or IP block is a reusable unit of logic, cell, or integrated circuit layout design that is the intellectual property of one party. IP cores can be licensed to another party or owned and used by a single party. The term comes from the licensing of the patent or source code copyright that exists in the design. Designers of system on chip (SoC), application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) and systems of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) logic can use IP cores as building blocks.
x87 is a floating-point-related subset of the x86 architecture instruction set. It originated as an extension of the 8086 instruction set in the form of optional floating-point coprocessors that work in tandem with corresponding x86 CPUs. These microchips have names ending in "87". This is also known as the NPX. Like other extensions to the basic instruction set, x87 instructions are not strictly needed to construct working programs, but provide hardware and microcode implementations of common numerical tasks, allowing these tasks to be performed much faster than corresponding machine code routines can. The x87 instruction set includes instructions for basic floating-point operations such as addition, subtraction and comparison, but also for more complex numerical operations, such as the computation of the tangent function and its inverse, for example.
The history of general-purpose CPUs is a continuation of the earlier history of computing hardware.
Quanta Computer, Inc. v. LG Electronics, Inc., 553 U.S. 617 (2008), is a case decided by the United States Supreme Court in which the Court reaffirmed the validity of the patent exhaustion doctrine. The decision made uncertain the continuing precedential value of a line of decisions in the Federal Circuit that had sought to limit Supreme Court exhaustion doctrine decisions to their facts and to require a so-called "rule of reason" analysis of all post-sale restrictions other than tie-ins and price fixes. In the course of restating the patent exhaustion doctrine, the Court held that it is triggered by, among other things, an authorized sale of a component when the only reasonable and intended use of the component is to engage the patent and the component substantially embodies the patented invention by embodying its essential features. The Court also overturned, in passing, that the exhaustion doctrine was limited to product claims and did not apply to method claims.
Licensed production is the production under license of technology developed elsewhere. The licensee provides the licensor of a specific product with legal production rights, technical information, process technology, and any other proprietary components that cannot be sourced by the licensor.
Intel microcode is microcode that runs inside x86 processors made by Intel. Since the P6 microarchitecture introduced in the mid-1990s, the microcode programs can be patched by the operating system or BIOS firmware to work around bugs found in the CPU after release. Intel had originally designed microcode updates for processor debugging under its design for testing (DFT) initiative.
