AMD went public September 27, 1972. It issued 620,000 shares at $15.50 per share, raising $7.5 million in capital. Unlike modern tech IPOs, AMD didn’t list on any of the major exchanges, opting to trade over the counter. on October 15, 1979, AMD listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and moved to the NASDAQ on January 2, 2015.
I’m not sure how many people realize AMD has been around more than 50 years. AMD was founded May 1, 1969 in Sunnyvale, Calif. Like rival Intel, it was founded by former Fairchild Semiconductor employees. In AMD’s case, it was Jerry Sanders and seven others.
Initially AMD focused on logic chips, moving into memory chips and then into processor logic chips and CPUs, and later, flash memory, network chips, and graphics chips.
AMD’s Reputation
There seems to be a conception that AMD, for most of its life, was a second-tier, off-brand chip maker. This has more to do with the effectiveness of Intel’s marketing than anything AMD was doing. AMD was not a stranger to the enterprise market. When you look at teardowns of 1970s and 1980s minicomputers, you frequently find AMD chips like the AMD2900 series ALUs inside them. The IT managers who shunned AMD CPUs in the 1990s most likely used minicomputers full of AMD parts earlier in their careers without having any idea.
Companies that used AMD2900-family chips included Apollo, AT&T, Centurion, Data General, Digital Equipment Corporation, Floating Point Systems, Hewlett-Packard, NCR, Tektronix, and Xerox. Basically, almost anything that wasn’t an IBM System/36.
AMD CPUs
In 1973, AMD cloned the Intel 8080 8-bit CPU. It launched in 1975 as the Am9080.
In 1976, Intel needed a second source to produce its 8085, 8086, and 8088 processors for IBM, so it turned to AMD. In 1982, Sanders renegotiated the licensing deal, enabling AMD to copy Intel’s processor microcode to make its own x86 processors. This led to the production of the AMD 386 after Intel stopped using second sources after the 80286 CPU.
Intel’s lawsuit caused AMD’s stock to collapse but didn’t stop the company. AMD ultimately prevailed and emerged as a consistent source for alternatives to Intel’s CPUs. Throughout the 90s, AMD trailed Intel, settling for selling low-end to midrange CPUs.
In 1995, when its competitor to Intel’s Pentium was late, AMD purchased competitor NexGen after Bill Gates introduced NexGen’s CEO, Atiq Raza, to Sanders. AMD used NexGen’s technology for subsequent CPUs. The AMD K6, based on NexGen technology, kept AMD in the game, but its successor, 1999’s Athlon CPU saw AMD challenging Intel at the high end of the product sector for the first time. AMD’s net sales jumped from $2.5 billion in 1998 to $4.6 billion by 2000 on the strength of the Athlon. The Athlon 64 CPU of 2003 took things a step further. It extended the x86 to 64 bits, and forced Intel to clone AMD.
Intel’s very successful i-series CPUs took market share from AMD until AMD responded with its very successful Ryzen line. As of 2026, AMD has about 36 percent of the CPU market.
AMD GPUs
On July 24, 2006, AMD announced its acquisition of the Canadian 3D graphics card company ATI Technologies, in a deal worth approximately $5.4 billion. The deal completed October 25, 2006. On August 30, 2010, AMD announced that it would retire the ATI brand name for its graphics chipsets in favor of the AMD brand name.
Much like AMD provides an alternative to Intel in the CPU space, AMD provides an alternative to Nvidia in the GPU space. AMD didn’t profit from the dotcom era as much as Intel did, but was in a position to do very well in the AI era of the 2020s.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.