Introduction
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc (AMD) was created in 1969 by former employees of Fairchild Semiconductor. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California where it was founded. AMD has a worldwide presence with facilities located in United States, Canada, Europe, Asia – Pacific, South and Central America, Caribbean, Middle East, and Africa. Currently, AMD employees 16,500 people worldwide. Initially, AMD produced logic chips and has evolved since then. In the 1970’s AMD went public and in 1979 started trading on the New York Stock Exchange (www.Wikipedia.com).
AMD is a leader in supply x86 processors, graphic cards, and GPUs. To attain this status, AMD acquired ATI in 2006. AMD also is a supplier of non-volatile flash memory as it owns 21% of Spansion. Overall in 2006, AMD ranked eighth in the manufacturing of semiconductors. Even though 2006 seemed like a good year for AMD, there were also some not-so-bright spots. In December, AMD and nVidia, AMD’s main competitor, both received subpoenas alleging antitrust violations regarding possible price fixing pertaining to their graphic card production (www.Wikipedia.com).
AMD s involved with a number of charitable efforts. AMD is working at connecting the world to the internet. They have started a program called 50x15 and the goal is to have at least 50% of the worlds population access to internet connections via affordable computers by 2015 (Wikipedia). AMD is a founding member of One Laptop Per Child with the goal of providing laptop computers to children in high growth countries access to computers. As per AMD’s annual report, they will donate $2 million dollars to assist with this endeavor. AMD is working with the Lance Armstrong Foundation to provide cancer patients around the world have access to te ...