If you can believe it, AMD just turned 55 years old. The CPU and GPU manufacturer celebrated its 55th anniversary by restoring old photos of AMD employees taken in 1969 through Ryzen AI. AMD also AI-upscaled a 14-year-old video special taken during its 40th anniversary featuring Nvidia CEO Jensen, of all people.
AMD showed several restored photos from the company's history. The first was an archival photo of AMD's twelfth employee, Rich Previte. Previte worked at AMD for 30 years in various roles and was even the CFO and President of AMD for some time. Before his time at AMD, he was part of the U.S. Army as a finance officer, and later a financial analyst for the Western Development Laboratory of Philco Corporation. He graduated with a degree in business from San Jose State University. After retiring in 2000, he consulted on the spinout of AMD's non-volatile memory business that even eventually became Global Foundries.
AMD restored two more images, one taken during its groundbreaking in 1969 and another that was captured during the merger between AMD and Monolithic Memories in the 80s. In 1969 (the year AMD was founded) AMD broke ground on its first building — the 915 DeGuigne in Sunnyvale California. Years later in the late 80s, AMD merged with Monolithic Memories to become the world's largest integrated circuit manufacturer at the time. The image of the merger shows AMD CEO Jerry Sanders and Monolithic CEO Irwin Federman sealing the deal.
With the help of Topaz Video AI, AMD upscaled its 40th-year anniversary special to 4K. The video shows most of AMD's past employees congratulating the company for its 40 years of service. But, the surprising tidbit is at the end of the video where Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang makes a brief appearance. In the video, Hung wished AMD a happy 40th anniversary and stated that AMD was responsible for giving him his first-ever job in the industry.
This is in fact true, before Nvidia was founded in the early 90s, Jensen Huang worked at AMD from 1984 to 1985 designing bleeding edge CPUs for the company. His time was brief but there's no denying that Huang indeed worked for AMD, before he became AMD's prime competitor in the GPU space after AMD overtook ATI in the 2000s. We wouldn't be surprised if Huang's learnings at AMD helped spur him to create Nvidia in 1993.
(Huang's ties with AMD go deeper than just his employment in the 1980s. Huang is a relative of current AMD CEO Lisa Su as well.)
AMD also showed off some images of the Saturn V rocket and the Apollo 11 take-off that were colorized with Ryzen AI. Photo restoration and video upscaling was done through Adobe Photoshop Neural Filters and Topaz Photo/Video AI on a single AMD Ryzen AI-based laptop.
AMD has had a crazy ride since its debut in 1969. The company has been at the forefront of modern technology since the beginning, being responsible for making the worlds first 64-bit CPU, and the first CPU to reach 1 GHz. It has also been under incredible trials with the company almost going bankrupt in the 2010s before Lisa Su took the helm and saved the company.
Today, AMD is at the bleeding edge of CPU technology thanks to its Zen architecture and XDNA NPU. With Zen, AMD has been able to build the Best CPUs for Gaming, and with XDNA AMD has been able to be one of the first manufacturers to build a CPU with AI-hardware acceleration capabilities.
