Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that designs, develops, and sells computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets.
Athlon is the brand name applied to a series of x86-compatible microprocessors designed and manufactured by AMD. The original Athlon was the first seventh-generation x86 processor and the first desktop processor to reach speeds of one gigahertz (GHz). It made its debut as AMD's high-end processor brand on June 23, 1999. Over the years AMD has used the Athlon name with the 64-bit Athlon 64 architecture, the Athlon II, and Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) chips targeting the Socket AM1 desktop SoC architecture, and Socket AM4 Zen (microarchitecture). The modern Zen-based Athlon with a Radeon Graphics processor was introduced in 2019 as AMD's highest-performance entry-level processor.
Radeon is a brand of computer products, including graphics processing units, random-access memory, RAM disk software, and solid-state drives, produced by Radeon Technologies Group, a division of AMD. The brand was launched in 2000 by ATI Technologies, which was acquired by AMD in 2006 for US$5.4 billion.
AnandTech was an online computer hardware magazine owned by Future plc. It was founded in April 1997 by then-14-year-old Anand Lal Shimpi, who served as CEO and editor-in-chief until August 30, 2014, with Ryan Smith replacing him as editor-in-chief. The web site was a source of hardware reviews for off-the-shelf components and exhaustive benchmarking, targeted towards computer-building enthusiasts, but later expanded to cover mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.
The nForce4 is a motherboard chipset released by Nvidia in October 2004. The chipset supports AMD 64-bit processors and Intel Pentium 4 LGA 775 processors.
AMD CrossFire is a brand name for the multi-GPU technology by Advanced Micro Devices, originally developed by ATI Technologies. The technology allows up to four GPUs to be used in a single computer to improve graphics performance.
The transistor count is the number of transistors in an electronic device. It is the most common measure of integrated circuit complexity. The rate at which MOS transistor counts have increased generally follows Moore's law, which observes that transistor count doubles approximately every two years. However, being directly proportional to the area of a die, transistor count does not represent how advanced the corresponding manufacturing technology is. A better indication of this is transistor density which is the ratio of a semiconductor's transistor count to its die area.
AMD Accelerated Processing Unit (APU), formerly known as Fusion, is a series of 64-bit microprocessors from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), combining a general-purpose AMD64 central processing unit (CPU) and 3D integrated graphics processing unit (IGPU) on a single die.
Phenom is the 64-bit AMD desktop processor line based on the K10 microarchitecture, in what AMD calls family 10h processors, sometimes incorrectly called "K10h". Triple-core versions belong to the Phenom 8000 series and quad cores to the AMD Phenom X4 9000 series. The first processor in the family was released in 2007.
Graphics Core Next (GCN) is the codename for a series of microarchitectures and an instruction set architecture that were developed by AMD for its GPUs as the successor to its TeraScale microarchitecture. The first product featuring GCN was launched on January 9, 2012.
AMD FX are a series of high-end AMD microprocessors for personal computers which debuted in 2011, claimed as AMD's first native 8-core desktop processor. The line was introduced with the Bulldozer microarchitecture at launch, and was then succeeded by its derivative Piledriver in 2012.
The GeForce 900 series is a family of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia, succeeding the GeForce 700 series and serving as the high-end introduction to the Maxwell microarchitecture, named after James Clerk Maxwell. They are produced with TSMC's 28 nm process.
Mantle was a low-overhead rendering API targeted at 3D video games. AMD originally developed Mantle in cooperation with DICE, starting in 2013. Mantle was designed as an alternative to Direct3D and OpenGL, primarily for use on personal computers, although Mantle supports the GPUs present in the PlayStation 4 and in the Xbox One. In 2015, Mantle's public development was suspended and in 2019 completely discontinued, as DirectX 12 and the Mantle-derived Vulkan rose in popularity.
The Radeon 400 series is a series of graphics processors developed by AMD. These cards were the first to feature the Polaris GPUs, using the new 14 nm FinFET manufacturing process, developed by Samsung Electronics and licensed to GlobalFoundries. The Polaris family initially included two new chips in the Graphics Core Next (GCN) family. Polaris implements the 4th generation of the Graphics Core Next instruction set, and shares commonalities with the previous GCN microarchitectures.
AMD Instinct is AMD's brand of data center GPUs. It replaced AMD's FirePro S brand in 2016. Compared to the Radeon brand of mainstream consumer/gamer products, the Instinct product line is intended to accelerate deep learning, artificial neural network, and high-performance computing/GPGPU applications.
Ryzen is a brand of multi-core x86-64 microprocessors designed and marketed by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) for desktop, mobile, server, and embedded platforms based on the Zen microarchitecture. It consists of central processing units (CPUs) marketed for mainstream, enthusiast, server, and workstation segments and accelerated processing units (APUs) marketed for mainstream and entry-level segments and embedded systems applications.
Zhaoxin is a fabless semiconductor company, created in 2013 as a joint venture between VIA Technologies and the Shanghai Municipal Government. The company manufactures x86-compatible desktop and laptop CPUs. The term Zhàoxīn means million core. The processors are created mainly for the Chinese market: the venture is an attempt to reduce the Chinese dependence on foreign technology.
PC Perspective is a web site dedicated to news and reviews of personal computing and gaming hardware. PC Perspective specializes in hardware that is most relevant to home users and enthusiasts. The site also has an active online community, a weekly podcast, and founder Ryan Shrout was the co-host of TWiT.tv's This Week in Computer Hardware.
Heaven Benchmark is benchmarking software based on the UNIGINE Engine. The benchmark was developed and published by UNIGINE Company in 2009. The main purpose of software is performance and stability testing for GPUs. Users can choose a workload preset, Basic or Extreme, or set the parameters by custom. The benchmark 3D scene is a steampunk-style city on flying islands in the middle of the clouds. The scene is GPU-intensive because of tessellation used for all the surfaces, dynamic sky with volumetric clouds and day-night cycle, real-time global illumination, and screen-space ambient occlusion.
Superposition Benchmark is a benchmarking software based on the UNIGINE Engine. The benchmark was developed and published by UNIGINE Company in 2017. The main purpose of software is performance and stability testing for GPUs. Users can choose a workload preset, Low to Extreme, or set the parameters by custom. The benchmark 3D scene is an office of a fictional genius scientist from the middle of the 20th century. The scene is GPU-intensive because of SSRTGI, proprietary dynamic lighting technology by Unigine.
