Writing
Tagged “amd”
3 articles
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The Evolution of Semiconductor Giants
Eight engineers walked out on William Shockley in 1957, and almost every chip company that matters descends from that walk-out or from a man who spent 25 years at Texas Instruments. How Fairchild, TI, Intel, AMD and…
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The History of AMD64 aka x86-64
Intel planned to take the PC to 64 bits with Itanium, a clean break from x86. AMD bolted 64 bits onto x86 instead, and won so completely that Intel had to license its rival's design. How that happened, what AMD64…
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The History of x86 Architecture
The 8086 was meant to be a stopgap. Forty-six years later its instruction set runs most of the world's servers and PCs, carrying every decision ever made about it. How a rushed 16-bit chip outlived everything designed…