About AMD

Type: Public company
Exchange Listing: NYSE: AMD
Year founded: 1969
Founders: Jerry Sanders and John Carey
Location: United States of America, Sunnyvale, California
Key figures: Dirk Meyer, CEO
Industry: Semiconductor devices
Products: Microprocessors, graphics processors, chipsets, video capture cards
Turnover: $13 billion (2007)
Net profit: $6,8 billion (2007)
Number of employees: 16 (719)
Website: www.amd.com

ATI Technologies is a Canadian company, manufacturer and supplier of graphics processing units and motherboard chipsets, operating from 1985 to 2006 and being one of the largest in its industry.

In 2006, it was acquired by AMD Corporation and became a division of the AMD Graphics Products Group. The ATi brand still remains in the video adapter market, however, due to the restructuring of the AMD business, which began in 2009, it may be replaced by AMD.

Today, AMD is one of the leaders in the market of computer microelectronics and, first of all, microprocessors. Despite the constant competitive race with such giants as Intel and NVIDIA, AMD's financial performance is growing steadily. Even amid the crisis, experts predict a very successful future for the company. In many ways, AMD's success today was founded in the last century, when the era of personal computers was just beginning.

History of AMD video cards:

August 20, 1985 - Array Technology Inc. is founded. Then, within five months, the company changed its name first to Array Technologies Inc. and then (December 18, 1985) to ATI Technologies Inc. The main line of business was the supply of integrated graphics solutions for large PC manufacturers such as IBM and Commodore;

By 1987, the company became an independent graphics adapter manufacturer;

In 1991, Mach 8 was released, the world's first video processor capable of processing graphics without the help of a CPU. A year later, Mach 32 appeared, which could also speed up the GUI;

In November 1993, the company became an open joint stock company. Its shares began trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange;

In 1994, the Mach 64 accelerator was released;

In April 1998, the company was recognized as a leader in the graphics solutions market according to International Data Corporation (IDC);

In November 1998, company president K.I. Ho was named Canada's Entrepreneur of the Year and was named one of the top 25 entrepreneurs in the world by Business Week Magazine in December;

In July 1999, the company had annual revenues of one billion US dollars;

2000 - the company releases the Radeon graphics processor;

2002 - In January, the company enters the market of graphics processors for cell phones and other portable devices with the release of IMAGEON;

2003-2004 - Radeon X300-X800 video cards were released in the new PCI Express bus standard;

2004 - the company's annual income exceeded two billion US dollars;

2005-2006 - a new family of video cards Radeon X1300-X1900 was released;

2006 - ATI Technologies was acquired by the American company AMD through the repurchase of all its shares for .4 billion. On October 25, 2006, ATI officially became a division of AMD;

In 2007, AMD announced that the division formed on the basis of ATI Technologies would be called AMD Graphics Products Group within the company. At the same time, ATI's main brand, Radeon, will remain in the names of future cards;

In 2007, the company released a new graphics chip of the HD2000 series, which turned out to be not very successful in terms of competition with Nvidia, later with the release of the HD3000 the situation improved a little;

2008 - the company released the highly successful HD4000 series, which provided the Californian company with worthy competition;

2009 - a new HD5000 chip with DirectX11 support is being prepared for release.