Last Updated on March 2, 2026 by Dave Farquhar
Jerry Sanders was a cofounder and the longtime CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, one of the longest running manufacturers of CPUs. He and eight other former Fairchild employees founded AMD in 1969. Sanders was born September 12, 1936, making this is as good of a day as any to look back on his career.
Humble beginnings
A native of Chicago, his parents were divorced so his paternal grandparents raised him. At 18, he stood up for a friend who was being beaten by a group of people in a street fight. The friend took off, and the gang turned on him, beating him nearly to death. A neighbor threw Sanders in the trunk of his car and drove him to the hospital, where he lay in a coma for three days and was even given last rites. But he survived. Reflecting on the experience, Sanders said it taught him loyalty.
Sanders attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he graduated from with a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering in 1958.
After graduation, Sanders worked briefly for the Douglas Aircraft Company and for Motorola, Then he moved to Fairchild Semiconductor. The move to Fairchild proved pivotal.
Fairchild
Sanders joined Fairchild Semiconductor in 1961 as a sales engineer. At Fairchild, Sanders quickly rose from lower sales positions up to a succession of management positions in marketing, making him a likely candidate for one of the company’s top vice presidencies, and, eventually, possibly even CEO.
However, in 1968, Sherman Fairchild brought in a new management team led by C. Lester Hogan, former vice president of Motorola Semiconductor. The ex-Motorola staff, also known as “Hogan’s Heroes,” were conservative and didn’t mesh with the boisterous Sanders. The flamboyant and outspoken Sanders clashed with the new management at Fairchild Semiconductor, so they fired him. Sanders said that, on his firing from Fairchild, “My whole life has been about treating people fairly, and I wasn’t treated fairly.”
A literal hall of fame of icons of the semiconductor industry left Fairchild in the late 1960s, which makes for an interesting might-have-been. Around the time Fairchild was firing Sanders, two other Fairchild refugees, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, were founding a little company called Intel. More on them later.
AMD
In 1969, eight engineers left Fairchild Semiconductor together to start a new company, founding Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in Sunnyvale, California, in May 1969. They asked Sanders to join them. He said he would, on one condition. He wanted to be president of the new company. The group was divided but ultimately agreed, founding the company with Sanders as President.
Innovation Magazine dubbed it “the least likely to succeed of the technology startups of the 68-69 timeframe,” Sanders recalled after his retirement. Sanders said the label made him want to prove them wrong.
Sanders’ skill at sales and marketing kept AMD successful even when it lagged behind its competitors in technology and manufacturing. About the only person Sanders couldn’t sell to was Michael Dell, whose eponymous company steadfastly insisted on remaining exclusively Intel during Sanders’ career. “I can’t sell a K6 to that guy no matter what I do,” Sanders famously said at the November 1997 Comdex.
Putting people first
During tough times, Jerry Sanders resisted layoffs like he had seen Fairchild do. In 1979, he refused to layoff AMD employees. Rather than a reduction in force, he asked them to work Saturdays to get more done and get new products out sooner. In good times, he shared the windfall with employees. Sanders gave each one of his employees $100 as they walked out of the door during AMD’s first $1 million quarter. Sanders also implemented a cash profit-sharing employee compensation program, where employees would regularly get profit checks of $1,000 or more.
AMD’s complex relationship with Intel
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 was responsible for a renegotiated licensing deal that would enable 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.
Jerry Sanders’ retirement
In 2000, Sanders recruited Héctor Ruiz from Motorola to serve as AMD’s president and CEO, and to become heir apparent to lead AMD upon Sanders’ retirement. Sanders stayed on as chairman after Ruiz succeeded him as CEO in 2002. In April 2004, Sanders stepped down as AMD chairman after 35 years at the company.
Sanders (in)famously said “Real men have fabs,” as a jab to competitors. Disagreement over when to build AMD’s fabrication plant in Dresden, Germany led to Raza’s departure from AMD, necessitating Ruiz’ recruitment. But after Sanders’ retirement, AMD spun off its fabrication operation, becoming fabless itself. AMD currently outsources production to Globalfoundries and TSMC.
Writing about Sanders in 2013 in his book, Slingshot: AMD’s Fight to Free an Industry from the Ruthless Grip of Intel, Ruiz had this to say:
Sanders was something of a paradox. On the one hand, he was full of energy and would never accept that AMD could fail. But on the other hand… no one inside AMD believed AMD could beat Intel in the marketplace or even mount a serious threat—not even [Sanders] the head of the company.
What happened to two of Jerry Sanders’ favorite companies
Sanders never could convince Dell to use AMD CPUs. Finally, in 2006, about two years after Sanders retired, Dell relented and started using AMD CPUs in some of its systems. AMD gained 26 percent of the server CPU market on the strength of its Athlon 64 platform between 2004 and 2006, and Dell eventually caved to market pressure.
What about Fairchild, the company who fired Sanders in 1968? For all the talent Fairchild had, it never seemed to find its way. It did some interesting things, including building a pioneering video game console, but changed hands three times during Sanders’ tenure at AMD, and in 2016, was acquired by ON Semiconductor for $2.6 billion. That’s about what AMD’s revenue was in 1998, during the K6 era.
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.