The Am9080 was a
CPU manufactured by
AMD. Originally produced without license as a clone of the
Intel 8080, the processor was reverse-engineered by
Ashawna Hailey,
Kim Hailey and
Jay Kumar by photographing an early Intel chip and developing a schematic and logic diagrams from the images.
In initial production, the chips cost about 50 cents to make, yielding 100 chips per wafer, and were sold into the military market for $700 each. This CPU operated at a speed of 2
MHz
The hertz (symbol: Hz) is the unit of frequency in the International System of Units (SI), often described as being equivalent to one event (or cycle) per second. The hertz is an SI derived unit whose formal expression in terms of SI base u ...
. Later, an agreement was made with Intel to become a licensed
second source for the 8080, enabling both manufacturers' chips to break into markets that would not accept a single-sourced part.
References
Am9080
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