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.

Plenty of other blogs from me on clients so today, the 6^th birthday of the AMD Opteron™ processor, let’s talk servers.

I sold my first server back in 1986. It was an IBM 3090-120 mainframe (the 120 was a down-clocked 150 – see no idea is new!). The customer was an insurance company that was transitioning to IBM S/390 architecture for two reasons:  the application and the throughput on transactions the system got. Even back in those days, the design of a server was a mixture of CPU, memory and I/O.

Today, we face a dramatically changed landscape of “good enough” computing.  While performance still matters and always will, the real challenges customers face today are driven by restrictions on energy consumption and space . Simply put, we often find ourselves having more compute power than we can actually, well, power.

So as businesses around the world are now being forced to do more with less, they might want to take some advice from their IT department, where the focus on efficiency is now firmly entrenched.

As always, today AMD is announcing new products that help customers drive great value from their IT investments.  As we celebrate six years of the AMD Opteron processor we are also announcing our most energy efficient processor ever to hit the market – this processor is your ideal cloud computing platform.

There are five main design criteria behind all our server platforms:

·         Server utilization – the ability to do more work in the same physical platform. Our advances in virtualization and AMD-V™ technologies are good example.

·         Server performance – the ability to do more work in less time – paid off by the platform architecture know as Direct Connect.

·         Performance Density – the ability to do more work in less space, through hardware integration and by keeping the socket the same for a long time

·         Server Efficiency – the ability to do more work using less power. We have combined our current and some new capabilities into a power solution called AMD-P.

·         Value for money – the ability to maintain and in some places lead in price performance at most if not all value points.

We are seeing the server market increasingly defined by two main sectors – the 4P and high-end 2P x86 market, and the 1 to 2P very low-power market.  Despite the obvious differences the common thread is the architecture. And today we talked about the next wave of innovation on that front with our Direct Connect Architecture 2.0 .

But what about raw power I hear you asking? What about the pure 0-60 speed of your processors? Don’t we care about that?

Yes. But servers are also about data and throughput, and AMD has been a leader in X86 server design because we understand this difference.

You see, we understand that old mainframe joke, the one that goes like this:

Question: What do all computers do at the same speed?

Answer: They wait for data.

(You can laugh now)

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.

Robert Kennedy made famous the alleged Chinese Curse to the effect of, "May You Live in Interesting Times." Historians haven’t been successful in verifying this gem so it appears to inauthentic, but it nonetheless sums up today’s world up nicely, don’t you think?

In my last blog I mused aloud how the economic uncertainty puts being smart about your computing purchases into perspective - and how. Now here I am in Munich at the Handelsblatt Annual Congress, and it’s heartening to see hundreds of senior IT people here exploring how to be smart about managing their IT. These folks aren’t playing ostrich; they’re here for actionable discussion.

I’m keynoting today, looking at how evolving technology trends - from virtualization to cloud computing to super-mobility - are undeniably transforming our lives - at work, home and play. For some time now the x86 computing world has been undergoing, if you will, a bifurcation between server and client computing devices, with the market demanding ever-more complicated servers yet less complexity in the client. Yet in both instances we’re looking for more utility, increased performance and a superior user experience.

So, what’s behind this?

First, server computing.

We know it’s expensive to power data centers, and we know it’s expensive to cool them. With the demand to store, access and manage data exponentially growing, the associated energy consumption costs have taken center stage - if you’re climbing out from under a rock let me be the first to tell you this isn’t going away. AMD has been at the forefront in addressing this for years, and the most current generation AMD Opteron™ processors are our most energy-efficient ever - just yesterday we introduced 5 new low-power processors.

And of course virtualization is an excellent way to achieve a more energy-efficient IT infrastructure. Starting from my IBM mainframe days I have written a lot on this subject, but what’s new is that beyond energy, space and cost savings, virtualization is now helping drive new approaches to how IT is managed. "Cloud Computing" in particular is capturing increasing attention because of the ready access - regardless of where you are - it promises.

This trend to smarter, more efficient servers will continue because our increasingly complicated, networked and data-rich world demands it.

And now, a look at what’s happening with clients.

I remember writing a memo for IBM about their evolving line of PCs, specifically The Convertible which was different from The Portable in as much as it was "movable!"

By today’s standards? Not so much.

Now we’re at the age of what I like to call "super-mobility," and my favorite recent example of this is the PC I’’m traveling with, Laptop Magazine’s Best of CES , the HP Pavilion dv2, based on the AMD "Yukon" platform for ultrathin notebooks. You can’t get it just yet but I expect you’ll want one as soon as you can.

Another compelling trend we’re seeing in client computing is the fact that the speed of the processor no longer defines the user experience. I’ll have more on this throughout the year (to illustrate my prediction, of course), for now let me just ask which was more important the last time you bought a PC: the graphics experience or the processor speed? That’s what I thought.

Interesting times, indeed!

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.

I am getting lots of question about the "AMD Fusion Render Cloud" project we introduced at CES and what exactly we are talking about.

As ever – it’s easier to show you than tell you. So as we say, see for yourself!

By the way, you may want to jump to 2mins 22 second in.

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.