DirkBroer
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3 months ago
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AMD first entered the CPU market with this reverse-engineered Intel 8080 clone, 50 years ago. Anybody a copy of this first AMD CPU?

AMD started manufacturing it's own unauthorized second-source 8080A microprocessor in 1975. The microprocessor was called 9080A, and it was a reverse-engineered version of Intel 8080A with slightly enhanced electrical parameters and smaller die size. As a direct result of releasing of the 9080A, AMD was able to negotiate technology and patent cross-license agreement with Intel in 1976. The cross-license agreement gave AMD limited rights to use Intel microcode, which didn't matter much for 8080A microprocessor as it didn't use microcode at all, but became very important 15 years later. As part this or related agreement AMD became an authorized second source of 8080A.

From AMD 8080 microprocessor family on CPU-World 
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DirkBroer
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3 months ago
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Another AMD CPU that rose to legendary status was the AMD 386DX-40, of which The Red Hill CPU Guide  wrote:

The all-time classic of 386 chips, and in our view the greatest individual X86 CPU of them all — certainly the one that brought modern computing to more people than any other.

This was the last and greatest 386, and AMD made it in enormous quantities. The DX-40 was vastly cheaper than a 486SX, which usually could not out-perform it anyway, and easily faster than Intel's best 386, the DX-33.

For year after year these sold, and it seemed like they would never die. Working techies used to love them because 386DX-40 systems just went and went and went. The technology was stable and more than sufficient to cope with the software of the day. If you had to name just one product that made everyday computing reliable and affordable, this would be it.

The 386DX-40 was the first CPU to run a 40MHz main board bus speed; perhaps this is why it was able to put so many 25 and 33MHz 486 systems to shame, and was able to keep on doing so right up until the day of the 486-66. From the point of view of a retailer, the DX-40 was just about perfect: fast, very cheap, and completely trouble-free. There have been other great CPUs since then — the 486DX/2-66, the 6x86 and Pentium Classic, the Duron, the K6-2/300, and the Athlon XP 2500 come to mind — but nothing has dominated the market for so long, so completely, or with such fuss-free reliability as the DX-40 did. We still miss them.



Red Hill Technology was a computer dealer based in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia. They went out of business in 2017 and retired completely in 2018.

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DirkBroer
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2 months ago
AMD hasn't always made solely x86/x86-64 architecture CPUs. In fact, they had their hands in the manufacturing of the Zilog-8000 series of CPUs back in 1978  UserPostedImage
In 1987 AMD pioneered in RISC with the AM29000 family 
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and in 2016 AMD produced the ARM-based Opteron 1100 family . Back in the days there was a rumour that the AM-1 platform might be used for those Opterons too, as these boards did not contain any other x86 specific hardware, other than the SOCs you were supposed to put into them. There no North- or Southbridge on these boards. A BIOS update was supposed to take care of changing to the ARM-based Opteron.
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Sadly, this did not take place and the three AM1 systems I bought are now testbeds for APU support in Linux and BSDs.
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DirkBroer
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a month ago
Another AMD CPU, after the AMD 386DX-40, that made a good impression was the AMD 486DX5-133. If you were lucky and had a 40 MHz bus speed mobo, you could run that said mobo at 4x 40=160 MHz (for some stupid reason Intel had invented that a clock tripler was a DX4, and not a DX3, so a DX5 did four times the bus speed and not five)
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If you were very, very lucky you had a 50 MHz mobo (once having had an Intel 486DX-50). Then you could run a 486 at 200 MHz, using the DX5-133....and this has been done!
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DirkBroer
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The next AMD cpu that went really fast was the K6-III+ 550. This cpu went in the Socket (Super) 7 platform. Intel had left Socket 7 and went proprietary Slot A by that time. All other CPU manufacturers were left with 66 MHz Socket 7 platform, and Intel thought they would die out there. Not so!
Socket Super 7 soon reached the 100 MHz (some boards even higher, e.g. the FIC VA-503+) b-fic-va503c.jpg You have insufficient rights to see the content. and, besides its high bus speed, the K6-III+ 550 had another trick on its sleeve: an onboard full-speed L2 cache. That meant that the cache on the motherboard -in those days often in COAST (cache on a stick) modules- became a L3 cache. This triple cache made the K6-III+ 550 superior to the Pentium III-550, as I discovered myself that my K6-III 400 @450 Mhz already outperformed the P-III 550 of the wifes PC.
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CPU 8080 AMD 80386 80486 risc ARM
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