AMD: Clean Room Clones, the Kryptonite K5 and the OpenAI Chip Deal

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Advanced Micro Devices was founded in 1969 when marketing executive Jerry Sanders and colleagues left Fairchild Semiconductor and rented a Sunnyvale headquarters. AMD began as a second-source supplier, building chips designed by Fairchild and National Semiconductor, and set itself apart by guaranteeing every chip met US Military Standard 883. Profits funded its own designs, including a 1970 logic counter and the 1971 Am2505 binary multiplier, and a 1977 joint venture with Siemens brought capital. When IBM chose Intel's x86 architecture for the IBM PC but demanded a second source, Intel and AMD signed a 10-year technology exchange agreement in 1982.

By 1984 Intel refused to share details of the 386, starting a seven-year legal fight that ended in 1994 when the Supreme Court of California ruled Intel had breached the contract. AMD built the Am386 through clean room reverse engineering and in 1996 released its first in-house x86 chip, the K5, with K for kryptonite. After buying ATI for $5.4 billion in 2006, AMD bled cash, spun off its factories as GlobalFoundries in 2008, and cut staff 10 percent in 2011 and 15 percent in 2012. Lisa Su became CEO in 2014, Zen and Ryzen arrived in 2017, and in early 2022 AMD's market value passed Intel's for the first time.

• Athlon and Opteron chips threatened Intel, and AMD broke the 1 gigahertz barrier first.
• Chips for Sony's PlayStation 4 and Microsoft's Xbox One, launched in late 2013, gave AMD steady revenue while it struggled.
• Zen used small chiplets joined together, cutting waste and allowing aggressive pricing against Intel.
• AMD closed a $50 billion acquisition of Xilinx, adding field programmable gate arrays, and held 36.5 percent of the server CPU market by July 2025.
• In late 2025 AMD agreed to supply six gigawatts of AI processors to OpenAI, which can buy up to 160 million AMD shares at one cent each if targets are met.