AMD is one of the two biggest CPU companies in the world, second only to Intel in market share. AMD was founded in 1969, and has revolutionized the CPU and chipset market. Today, AMD is a large corporation with over 1 billion dollars in quarterly revenue and almost 10,000 employees worldwide.

Any high-end gamer or 64-bit enthusiast will likely tell you they are running a AMD Athlon 64 CPU of some sort as their primary computing platform. While Intel has mainly improved their cache sizes, implemented Hyper-threading and Dual Cores into their CPU lineup, AMD was the first of the Wintel CPU manufacturers to implement 64-bit support and has really driven the market in terms of the enthusiast.

NVIDIA has really dominated the AMD chipset market for years since the release of their nForce2 chipset in 2002. Today they are a multi-billion dollar revenue company with over 2,000 employees. Subsequent chipsets have included the nForce3, the nForce3 250Gb, the nForce4, the nForce4 SLI, the nForce4 Ultra. Today NVIDIA is announcing their nForce5 series to coincide with the AMD AM2 launch.