AMD is based in Sunnyvale, California. The company was established in 1969. At present, it has 11,705 employees stationed worldwide. It operates in more than 50 locations around the world. Its stocks are traded on the New York Stock Exchange. In 2011, AMD reported revenues of $6.57 billion.
The company has kept its lead in innovative semiconductors through its research and development facilities numbering to over a dozen of them. Its sales are kept at a high note because of the high performance of over two dozens of international sales offices. Its back-end production facilities are located in Singapore, China and Malaysia.
AMD’s APUs are used for commercial and consumer notebooks, desktops, x86 microprocessors and embedded markets. The company manufactures embedded microprocessors for commercial and consumer uses; chipsets for notebooks PCs and desktops, embedded systems, and professional servers and workstations; and, video, graphics and multimedia technologies and products used in notebook PCs, desktops, embedded systems, professional servers and workstations, and game consoles.
In 2011, AMD has shipped over 30 million APUs; an evidence of its significant contribution to the IT industry. In that year, AMD also launched its OpteronTM 4200 and 6200 series processors. These processors are designed to withstand a highly virtualized workload while maintaining its energy efficiency at a high level.
On the same year, AMD has also shipped over 100 million units of DirectX® graphic processors that support 6 new game engines and 31 new game titles.
AMD is also the producer of the fastest single GPU, the AMD RadeonTM HD 7970. AMD has powered 63 of the top 500 Supercomputers, most of which are supercomputers found in the UK, Switzerland and Germany.
The AMD FireProTM V4900 is AMD’s superior performance graphics semiconductor designed for creating excellent digital contents and computer assisted designs (CAD).
The “ambidextrous” strategy employed by AMD started history for the company in its x86 graphics innovation while at the same time keeping other IPs and technologies in the process. AMD also adopted a roadmap, an SoC-centric, one which is designed to help speed time-to-market, drive a more sustained execution, and allow the development of solutions that would fit the needs of customers.