Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (abbreviated AMD; ) is an American company that manufactures semiconductors. It is based in Sunnyvale, California and was founded in 1969 by a group of former executives from Fairchild Semiconductor, including Jerry Sanders, III, Ed Turney, John Carey, Sven Simonsen, Jack Gifford and three members from Gifford's team, Frank Botte, Jim Giles, and Larry Stenger. The current chairman and chief executive officer is Dr. Héctor Ruiz and the current president and chief operating officer is Dirk Meyer.
AMD is the world's second-largest supplier of computer processors based on the x86 architecture, and the third-largest supplier of graphics cards and graphics processing units (GPUs), after taking control of ATI Technologies in 2006. AMD also owns a 21% share of Spansion, a supplier of non-volatile flash memory. In 2007 AMD ranked eleventh among semiconductor manufacturers.
