AMD

Based out of Sunnyvale, California and founded in 1969, AMD, or Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., is the designer and manufacturer of microchips used in some of the most powerful and versatile electronic devices on the market. Their cutting-edge circuit design allows large amounts of information to be processed at a very high speed. This efficiency makes AMD chips perfect for devices such as personal computers and hand-held music players.

Most of AMD's products can basically be put into two main categories: microprocessors and flash memory. Of these two categories, most casual consumers will probably recognize the first much better than the second. Microprocessors are tiny, incredibly complicated computer chips. By regulating the conduction of electricity between a vast network of other devices, they basically function as the "brain" of most pieces of electronics.

AMD's microprocessor chips have been some of the most powerful and successful in the industry. Their x86 variety of processors (including the Athlon, Opteron, Turion, Sempron, and Duron lines) have been used in many Apple computers since the company's inception. Both versatile and powerful, AMD's microprocessors have carved themselves a sizable niche in the lucrative international computing market.

Flash Memory is another chip type in which AMD specializes. Flash Memory is basically a type of microchip that you can both write on and read from: it can be erased and than refilled as many times as you want, much like the better known RAM chips. AMD's Flash Memory chips are extremely popular, being in general much faster than traditional RAM chips.