AMD 2009 Annual Report Download - page 12

“AMD.” Our mailing address and executive offices are located at One AMD Place, Sunnyvale, California 94088,
and our telephone number is [phone]. References in this report to “AMD,” “we,” “us,” “management,”
“our,” or the “Company” means Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. and our consolidated majority-owned
subsidiaries and GF and its subsidiaries. However, references in the “Business” and “Risk Factors” sections to
“AMD,” “we,” “us,” “management,” “our,” or the “Company” do not include GF or its subsidiaries unless
specifically stated otherwise.
AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, ATI, the ATI logo, AMD Athlon, AMD Opteron, AMD Phenom, AMD
PowerNow!, AMD Sempron, AMD Turion, Cool‘n’Quiet, Geode, FirePro, Radeon, and combinations thereof are
trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Microsoft, Windows, Windows Vista, and DirectX are registered
trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. HyperTransport is a licensed
trademark of the HyperTransport Technology Consortium. Other names are for informational purposes only and
may be trademarks of their respective owners.
Website Access to Company Reports and Corporate Governance Documents
We post on the Investor Relations pages of our Web site, www.amd.com, a link to our filings with the SEC,
our Principles of Corporate Governance, our Code of Ethics for our Chief Executive Officer, Chief Financial
Officer, Corporate Controller and other senior finance executives, our “Worldwide Standards of Business
Conduct,” which applies to our directors and all of our employees, and the charters of our Audit and Finance,
Compensation and Nominating and Corporate Governance committees of our Board of Directors. Our filings
with the SEC are posted as soon as reasonably practical after they are electronically filed with, or furnished to,
the SEC. You can also obtain copies of these documents by writing to us at: Corporate Secretary, AMD, 7171
Southwest Parkway, M/S 100, Austin, Texas 78735, or emailing us at: [email protected]. All of
these documents and filings are available free of charge. Please note that information contained on our Web site
is not incorporated by reference in, or considered to be a part of, this report.
Our Industry
Semiconductors are components used in a variety of electronic products and systems. An integrated circuit,
or IC, is a semiconductor device that consists of many interconnected transistors on a single chip. Since the
invention of the transistor in 1948, improvements in IC process and design technologies have led to the
development of smaller, more complex and more reliable ICs at a lower cost per function. In order to satisfy the
demand for faster, smaller and lower-cost ICs, semiconductor manufacturers have continually developed
improvements in manufacturing and process technology. ICs are increasingly being manufactured using smaller
geometries on larger silicon wafers. Use of smaller process geometries can result in products that are higher
performing, use less power and cost less to manufacture on a per unit basis.
As a result of the credit market crisis in 2008 and other macroeconomic challenges affecting the global
economy, end user demand for PCs and servers, and therefore ICs, decreased significantly in the first half of
2009. Although end-user PC demand stabilized in the second half of 2009, end-customers continue to demand
value-priced products.
Computing Solutions
The x86 Microprocessor Market
A microprocessor is an IC that serves as the central processing unit, or CPU, of a computer. It generally
consists of millions of transistors that process data and control other devices in the system, acting as the brain of
the computer. The performance of a microprocessor is a critical factor impacting the performance of a computer
and numerous other electronic systems. The principal indicators of CPU performance are work-per-cycle, or how
many instructions are executed per cycle, clock speed, representing the rate at which a CPU’s internal logic
operates, measured in units of hertz, or cycles per second, and power consumption. Other factors impacting
microprocessor performance include the number of CPUs, or cores, on a microprocessor, the bit rating of the
microprocessor, memory size and data access speed.
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