AMD

In 1969 AMD was founded. In 1975 AMD had its first big break, they had reverse engineered one of Intels chips giving them a huge boost to their development. In the 1980s AMD was producing chips for Intel under license helping the company to grow rapidly. In the 90's AMD was able to rival Intel with their own designs. AMDs K6 line was a great competitor to Intels Pentium chips. in 1999 the Athlon series of chips launched, they were the first x86 chip to achieve clock speeds over 1GHz and had superior performance to the Pentium III. In 2003 AMD cerated the x86-64 architecture which allowed for 64 bit computing while allowing for compatibility with 32 bit programs. Eventually AMD64 became the industry standard. in 2006 AMD acquired ATI technologies for $5.4 billion to create GPUs. By 2014 things were looking bleak and seeming like AMD would not survive. Under new leadership everything seemed to turn around the Ryzen series of processors were released along with the EPYC series for servers and RDNA and RDNA 2 brought AMD out from the ashes and brought them back to being a competitive player in the industry. AMD coming back from the ashes is important because it restored competition, lowered prices and forced Intel and Nvidia to innovate.