Advanced Micro Devices was founded on May 1, 1969 by Jerry Sanders and his compadres from Fairchild Semiconductor, now a subsidiary of ON Semiconductor. That’s the same IC company that Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce worked at before founding Intel back in the day. Following the development of its own microprocessors, logic chips, RAM, and after multiple cross-licensing agreements with Intel, it’s been slowly rising up to become the only major, multifaceted contender to the x86 originator in the CPU market.
And it’s now celebrating 50 years at a time when its CPU division is metaphorically killing it. And that means some special products that may tickle gamers’ fancy. The main event is the Ryzen 7 2700X 50th Anniversary Edition, which was reportedly leaked by a retailer a little early. Aside from the gold accented box, we don’t know if or how this rumoured chip will differ from the usual fare. However, if it’s anything like Intel’s celebratory Core i7 8086K, we could see AMD bin the best performing silicon for a slight bump in clockspeed. Still, it’s a hard sell with AMD Ryzen 3000 around the corner.