We’re gearing up for a yearlong celebration of AMD’s 40^th anniversary – and we hope you’ll help us celebrate. Forty years ago this May, Jerry Sanders and the gang of seven set up shop in Sunnyvale, CA with $100,000. 

Just ten years later, AMD was operating its own cutting-edge manufacturing facilities in Austin and entering the big leagues with a listing on the New York Stock Exchange.  Over these forty years AMD has transformed from a second source supplier for IBM to an x86 fast-follower and, today, to a recognized innovation leader that has made an enduring, positive impact on IT.

Our anniversary Web page has a great timeline of AMD’s history of innovation, and I urge you to explore that.

But the best is yet to come.

By any measure, the AMD of 2009 is a very different company than the one that came to be forty years ago – and that’s a good thing.  Like any wise 40 year-old, we’ve been exercising and reinvesting in ourselves.  And while, yes, these are challenging economic times, AMD continues to drive innovation in the industry with new technologies and platforms that are designed for where the industry is heading – designed for how you use computing in your daily life:

• Like our Yukon platform for ultrathin laptops, which is helping to usher in a new era of computing;
• And our ATI Mobility Radeon^TM HD 4000 series graphics processors that deliver a home theatre-quality HD multimedia experience on your HD monitor;
• And our most energy efficient AMD Opteron^TM processor ever to hit the market – a processor that is an ideal cloud computing platform.

Now onto the fun stuff! 

AMD has never been an orthodox business, and true to form we are not celebrating our 40^th in a traditional way: instead of receiving presents we are giving them!  Because we would not be turning 40 without you, our loyal customers – from the IT manager who goes against the grain by shaking up the server mix in a Fortune 500 company to the gaming enthusiast who knows the best experience is on a system powered by AMD chips and ATI graphics.

To “thank you” for your support over the years, today we are rolling-out a series of contests that we plan to run throughout the year, enabling our fans to connect in fun ways with us – and one another – not to mention a chance to win some AMD (and AMD-powered) products.

The first contest will call on the enthusiast community to use their creativity to deliver videos and photos of their AMD gear.  I can’t wait to see what you come up with.  Stop by the anniversary site regularly to see submissions and be a part of the action. 

Maybe I’ll even submit my own video…  

Note: Pat Moorhead, AMD’s VP of Advanced Marketing, has some quite passionate thoughts of his own about our 40th anniversary here.

Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.