AMD Am29000

The AMD Am29000, often simply 29k, was a popular family of 32-bit RISC microprocessors and microcontrollers developed and fabricated by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). They were, for a time, the most popular RISC chips on the market, widely used in laser printers from a variety of manufacturers. In late 1995 AMD dropped development of the 29k because the design team was transferred to support the PC side of the business. What remained of AMD's embedded business was realigned towards the embedded 186 family of 80186 derivatives. The majority of AMD's resources were then concentrated on their high-performance, desktop x86 clones, using many of the ideas and individual parts of the latest 29k to produce the AMD K5.

The 29000 evolved from the same Berkeley RISC design that also led to the Sun SPARC and Intel i960. One "trick" used in all of the Berkeley-derived designs is the concept of register windows, a technique used to speed up procedure calls significantly. The basic idea is to use a large set of registers as a stack, loading local data into a set of registers during a call, and marking them "dead" when the procedure returns. Values being returned from the routines would be placed in the "global page", the top eight registers in the SPARC (for instance). It is interesting to note that the competing early RISC design from Stanford University, the Stanford MIPS, also looked at this concept but decided that improved compilers could make more efficient use of general purpose registers than a hard-wired window, something that has proven true over the years.

`Amd

`Amd is a village in western central Yemen. It is located in the San‘a’ Governorate.

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Advanced Micro Devices

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American worldwide semiconductor company based in Sunnyvale, California, United States, that develops computer-processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While initially it manufactured its own processors, the company became fabless after GlobalFoundries was spun off in 2009. AMD's main products include microprocessors, motherboard chipsets, embedded processors and graphics processors for servers, workstations and personal computers, and embedded systems applications.

AMD is the second-largest supplier and only significant rival to Intel in the market for x86-based microprocessors. Since acquiring ATI in 2006, AMD and its competitor Nvidia have dominated the discrete graphics processor unit (GPU) market.

Company history

First twelve years

Advanced Micro Devices was formally incorporated on May 1, 1969, by Jerry Sanders, along with seven of his colleagues from Fairchild Semiconductor. Sanders, an electrical engineer who was the director of marketing at Fairchild, had like many Fairchild executives grown frustrated with the increasing lack of support, opportunity, and flexibility within that company, and decided to leave to start his own semiconductor company. The previous year Robert Noyce, who had invented the first practical integrated circuit or microchip in 1959 at Fairchild, had left Fairchild together with Gordon Moore and founded the semiconductor company Intel in July 1968.

Stock exchange

A stock exchange or bourse is an exchange where stock brokers and traders can buy and/or sell stocks (also called shares), bonds, and other securities. Stock exchanges may also provide facilities for issue and redemption of securities and other financial instruments, and capital events including the payment of income and dividends. Securities traded on a stock exchange include stock issued by listed companies, unit trusts, derivatives, pooled investment products and bonds. Stock exchanges often function as "continuous auction" markets, with buyers and sellers consummating transactions at a central location, such as the floor of the exchange.

To be able to trade a security on a certain stock exchange, it must be listed there. Usually, there is a central location at least for record keeping, but trade is increasingly less linked to such a physical place, as modern markets use electronic networks, which gives them advantages of increased speed and reduced cost of transactions. Trade on an exchange is restricted to brokers who are members of the exchange. In recent years, various other trading venues, such as electronic communication networks, alternative trading systems and "dark pools" have taken much of the trading activity away from traditional stock exchanges.