title: Three Gorges Dam

text: Research by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization suggested that the Asia-Pacific region would, overall, gain about of forest by 2008. That is a significant change from the net loss of forest each year in the 1990s. This is largely due to China's large reforestation effort. This accelerated after the 1998 Yangtze River floods convinced the government that it should restore tree cover, especially in the Yangtze's basin upstream of the Three Gorges Dam.


title: Three Gorges Dam

text: Concerns about the potential wildlife impact of the dam predate the National People's Congress's approval in 1992. This region has long been known for its rich biodiversity. It is home to 6,388 species of plants, which belong to 238 families and 1,508 genera. Of these plant species, 57 percent are endangered. These rare species are also used as ingredients in traditional Chinese medicines. Already, the percentage of forested area in the region surrounding the Three Gorges Dam has dropped from twenty percent in 1950 to less than ten percent as of 2002, negatively affecting all plant species in this locality. The region also provides habitats to hundreds of freshwater and terrestrial animal species. Freshwater fish are especially affected by dams due to changes in the water temperature and flow regime. Many other fish are injured in the turbine blades of the hydroelectric plants as well. This is particularly detrimental to the ecosystem of the region because the Yangtze River basin is home to 361 different fish species and accounts for 27 percent of all endangered freshwater fish species in China. Other aquatic species have been endangered by the dam, particularly the baiji, or Chinese river dolphin, now extinct. In fact, Chinese Government scholars even claim that the Three Gorges Dam directly caused the extinction of the baiji. The Chinese paddlefish is also extinct in part due to the dam blocking its migration.


title: Three Gorges Dam

text: Of the 3,000 to 4,000 remaining critically endangered Siberian crane, a large number currently spend the winter in wetlands that will be destroyed by the Three Gorges Dam. The dam contributed to the functional extinction of the baiji Yangtze river dolphin. Though it was close to this level even at the start of construction, the dam further decreased its habitat and increased ship travel, which are among the factors causing what will be its ultimate demise. In addition, populations of the Yangtze sturgeon are guaranteed to be "negatively affected" by the dam.


title: Three Gorges Dam

text: In 2005, NASA scientists calculated that the shift of water mass stored by the dams would increase the total length of the Earth's day by 0.06 microseconds and make the Earth slightly more round in the middle and flat on the poles. A study published in 2022 in the journal Open Geosciences suggests that the change of reservoir water level affects the gravity field in western Sichuan, which in turn affects the seismicity in that area.


title: Three Gorges Dam

text: An important function of the dam is to control flooding, which is a major problem for the seasonal river of the Yangtze. Millions of people live downstream of the dam, with many large, important cities like Wuhan, Nanjing, and Shanghai located adjacent to the river. Plenty of farm land and China's most important industrial area are built beside the river.


title: Three Gorges Dam

text: The reservoir's flood storage capacity is . This capacity will reduce the frequency of major downstream flooding from once every 10 years to once every 100 years. The dam is expected to minimize the effect of even a "super" flood. In 1954, the river flooded , killing 33,169 people and forcing 18,884,000 people to move. The flood covered Wuhan, a city of eight million people, for over three months, and the Jingguang Railway was out of service for more than 100 days. The 1954 flood carried of water. The dam could only divert the water above Chenglingji, leaving to be diverted. Also, the dam cannot protect against some of the large tributaries downstream, including the Xiang, Zishui, Yuanshui, Lishui, Hanshui, and the Gan.


title: Three Gorges Dam

text: In 1998, a flood in the same area caused billions of dollars in damage; of farmland were flooded. The flood affected more than 2.3 million people, killing 1,526. In early August 2009, the largest flood in five years passed through the dam site. The dam limited the water flow to less than per second, raising the upstream water level from on August 1, 2009, to on August 8, 2009. A full of flood water was captured and the river flow was cut by as much as per second.


title: Three Gorges Dam

text: The dam discharges its reservoir during the dry season between December and March every year. This increases the flow rate of the river downstream, and provides fresh water for agricultural and industrial usage. It also improves shipping conditions. The water level upstream drops from , preparing for the rainy season. The water also powers the Gezhouba Dam downstream.


title: Three Gorges Dam

text: Since the filling of the reservoir in 2003, the Three Gorges Dam has supplied an extra of fresh water to downstream cities and farms during the dry season.


title: Three Gorges Dam

text: During the 2010 South China floods in July, inflows at the Three Gorges Dam reached a peak of , exceeding the peak during the 1998 Yangtze River Floods. The dam's reservoir rose nearly in 24 hours and reduced the outflow to in discharges downstream, effectively alleviating serious impacts on the middle and lower river.


title: Three Gorges Dam

text: The installation of ship locks is intended to increase river shipping from ten million to 100 million tonnes annually; as a result transportation costs will be cut between 30 and 37%. Shipping will become safer, since the gorges are notoriously dangerous to navigate.


title: Three Gorges Dam

text: There are two series of ship locks installed near the dam (). Each of them is made up of five stages, with transit time at around four hours. Maximum vessel size is 10,000 tons. The locks are 280 m long, 35 m wide, and 5 m deep (918 × 114 × 16.4 ft). That is longer than those on the St Lawrence Seaway, but half as deep. Before the dam was constructed, the maximum freight capacity at the Three Gorges site was 18.0 million tonnes per year. From 2004 to 2007, a total of 198 million tonnes of freight passed through the locks. The freight capacity of the river increased six times and the cost of shipping was reduced by 25%. The total capacity of the ship locks is expected to reach 100 million tonnes per year.


title: Three Gorges Dam

text: These locks are staircase locks, whereby inner lock gate pairs serve as both the upper gate and lower gate. The gates are the vulnerable hinged type, which, if damaged, could temporarily render the entire flight unusable. As there are separate sets of locks for upstream and downstream traffic, this system is more water efficient than bi-directional staircase locks.


title: Three Gorges Dam

text: In addition to the canal locks, there is a ship lift, a kind of elevator for vessels. The ship lift can lift ships of up to 3,000 tons. The vertical distance traveled is , and the size of the ship lift's basin is . The ship lift takes 30 to 40 minutes to transit, as opposed to the three to four hours for stepping through the locks. One complicating factor is that the water level can vary dramatically. The ship lift must work even if water levels vary by on the lower side, and on the upper side.


title: Three Gorges Dam

text: The ship lift was not yet complete when the rest of the project was officially opened on May 20, 2006.


title: Three Gorges Dam

text: In November 2007, it was reported in the local media that construction of the ship lift started in October 2007.


title: Three Gorges Dam

text: In February 2012, "Xinhua" reported that the four towers that are to support the ship lift had almost been completed.


title: Three Gorges Dam

text: The report said the towers had reached of the anticipated , the towers would be completed by June 2012 and the entire shiplift in 2015.


title: Three Gorges Dam

text: As of May 2014, the ship lift was expected to be completed by July 2015. It was tested in December 2015 and announced complete in January 2016. Lahmeyer, the German firm that designed the ship lift, said it will take a vessel less than an hour to transit the lift. An article in Steel Construction says the actual time of the lift will be 21 minutes. It says that the expected dimensions of the passenger vessels the ship lift's basin was designed to carry will be . The moving mass (including counterweights) is 34,000 tonnes.


title: Three Gorges Dam

text: The trials of elevator finished in July 2016, the first cargo ship was lifted on July 15; the lift time comprised 8 minutes.


title: Three Gorges Dam

text: "Shanghai Daily" reported that the first operational use of the lift was on September 18, 2016, when limited "operational testing" of the lift began.


title: Three Gorges Dam

text: Plans also exist for the construction of short portage railways bypassing the dam area altogether. Two short rail lines, one on each side of the river, are to be constructed. The northern portage railway () will run from the Taipingxi port facility () on the northern side of the Yangtze, just upstream from the dam, via Yichang East Railway Station to the Baiyang Tianjiahe port facility in Baiyang Town (), below Yichang. The southern portage railway () will run from Maoping (upstream of the dam) via Yichang South Railway Station to Zhicheng (on the Jiaozuo–Liuzhou Railway).


title: Three Gorges Dam

text: Though the large size of the reservoir caused huge relocation upstream, it was considered justified by the flood protection it provides for communities downstream. As of June 2008, China relocated 1.24 million residents (ending with Gaoyang in Hubei Province) as 13 cities, 140 towns and 1350 villages either flooded or were partially flooded by the reservoir, about 1.5% of the province's 60.3 million and Chongqing Municipality's 31.44 million population. About 140,000 residents were relocated to other provinces.


title: Three Gorges Dam

text: Relocation was completed on July 22, 2008. Some 2007 reports claimed that Chongqing Municipality will encourage an additional four million people to move away from the dam to the main urban area of Chongqing by 2020.


title: Three Gorges Dam

text: However, the municipal government explained that the relocation is due to urbanization, rather than the dam, and people involved included other areas of the municipality.


title: Three Gorges Dam

text: The reservoir flooded some 1,300 archaeological sites and altered the appearance of the Three Gorges as the water level rose over . Cultural and historical relics are being moved to higher ground as they are discovered, but the flooding inevitably covered undiscovered relics. Some sites could not be moved because of their location, size, or design such as the hanging coffins site high in the Shen Nong Gorge is part of the cliffs. The ancient cities of Guizhou, Kuizhou and Wushan were also completely submerged.


title: Three Gorges Dam

text: The United States Department of Defense reported that in Taiwan, "proponents of strikes against the mainland apparently hope that merely presenting credible threats to China's urban population or high-value targets, such as the Three Gorges Dam, will deter Chinese military coercion." Destroying the Three Gorges Dam has been a tactic discussed and debated in Taiwan since the early 1990s, when the Dam was still in the planning phase.


title: Three Gorges Dam

text: The notion that the military in Taiwan would seek to destroy the dam provoked an angry response from the mainland Chinese media. People's Liberation Army General Liu Yuan was quoted in the "China Youth Daily" saying that the People's Republic of China would be "seriously on guard against threats from Taiwan independence terrorists."


title: Three Gorges Dam

text: The Three Gorges Dam is a steel-concrete gravity dam. The water is held back by the innate mass of the individual dam sections. As a result, damage to an individual section should not affect other parts of the dam. Zhang Boting, deputy secretary-general of China Society for Hydropower Engineering, suggested that concrete gravity dams are resistant to nuclear strikes. Sung Chao-wen, former Taiwanese Ministry of Defense advisor, called the notion of using cruise missiles to destroy the Three Gorges Dam "ridiculous". He cited missiles would only deliver minimal damage to the reinforced concrete, and any attack attempts would need to go through multiple layers of ground and air defenses.


title: Three Gorges Dam

text: Immediately after the first filling of the reservoir, around 80 hairline cracks were observed in the dam's structure; however, an experts group gave the project overall a good-quality rating and the 163,000 concrete units all passed quality testing, with normal deformation within design limits.


title: Three Gorges Dam

text: In order to maximize the utility of the Three Gorges Dam and cut down on sedimentation from the Jinsha River, the upper course of the Yangtze River, authorities plan to build a series of dams on the Jinsha, including Wudongde Dam, Baihetan Dam, along with the now completed Xiluodu and Xiangjiaba dams. The total capacity of those four dams is 38,500 MW, almost double the capacity of the Three Gorges.


title: Three Gorges Dam

text: Baihetan is under construction and should be fully operational by July 2022. Wudongde was opened in June 2021. Another eight dams are in the midstream of the Jinsha and eight more upstream of it.


title: Erin Brockovich (film)

text: Erin Brockovich is a 2000 American biographical legal drama film directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by Susannah Grant. The film is a dramatization of the true story of Erin Brockovich, portrayed by Julia Roberts, who fought against the energy corporation Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) regarding its culpability for the Hinkley groundwater contamination incident. The film was a box-office success, and gained a positive critical reaction.


title: Erin Brockovich (film)

text: The film received five nominations at the 73rd Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director for Soderbergh, Best Original Screenplay for Grant, Best Actress for Roberts (which she won), and Best Supporting Actor for Finney. Roberts also won a BAFTA award, a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and multiple critics awards. Soderbergh received a separate Best Director nomination for "Traffic", another film released that same year, which he won. Early in the film, the real Erin Brockovich has a cameo appearance as a waitress named Julia; the real Ed Masry also appears in the same scene.


title: Erin Brockovich (film)

text: In 1993, Erin Brockovich is an unemployed single mother of three children who has recently been injured in a traffic accident with a doctor and is suing him. Her lawyer, Ed Masry, expects to win, but Erin's confrontational courtroom behavior under cross-examination loses her the case, and Ed will not return her phone calls afterwards. One day, he arrives at work to find her in the office, apparently working. She says that he told her things would work out and they did not, and that she needed a job. She asks Ed for a job, which he reluctantly gives her.


title: Erin Brockovich (film)

text: Erin is given files for a real estate case where the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) is offering to purchase the home of Donna Jensen, a resident of Hinkley, California. Erin is surprised to see medical records in a real estate file and visits Donna, who explains that she had simply kept all her PG&E correspondence together. Donna appreciates PG&E's help: she has had several tumors and her husband has Hodgkin's lymphoma, but PG&E has always provided a doctor at their own expense. Erin asks why they would do that, and Donna replies, "because of the chromium". Erin begins digging into the case and finds evidence that the groundwater in Hinkley is seriously contaminated with carcinogenic hexavalent chromium, while PG&E has been telling Hinkley residents that they use a safer form of chromium. After several days away from the office investigating, she finds her possessions missing from her desk. She is then informed by Brenda, Mr. Masry's secretary, that she has been fired for missing a week of work. Despite protesting that she has been out conducting research, Erin nevertheless leaves defeated.


title: Erin Brockovich (film)

text: Later, Ed visits Erin because he needs the documents she found while investigating, and she takes the chance to request her job back in return. Rehired, she continues her research, and over time, visits many Hinkley residents and gains their trust. Ed and Erin hold a barbecue in order to speak to many of the residents and explain to them what PG&E has been trying to get away with, at which point Erin is awkwardly flirted with by one of the men. Erin and Ed find numerous medical problems in Hinkley, and that virtually everyone has been treated by PG&E's doctors who have led them to believe their issues are unrelated to the "safe" chromium. The Jensens' claim for compensation ultimately becomes a major class action lawsuit. Unfortunately, Ed explains that all direct evidence is linked solely to PG&E Hinkley, rather than PG&E corporate. Until headquarters can be implicated, PG&E corporate can deny any knowledge of what's happening in Hinkley.


title: Erin Brockovich (film)

text: Knowing that PG&E could slow any settlement for years through delays and appeals, Ed decides to pursue binding arbitration rather than a trial by jury, but PG&E will only agree to arbitration if 90% of the plaintiffs agree. During a town hall meeting with the Hinkley residents, Ed goes over the plan with everyone feeling unsure. At one point, Erin spots the man who flirted with her at the barbecue. She brushes off the man's looks, as Ed struggles to explain the virtue of arbitration versus a 10–15 year battle in court. Eventually everyone in attendance agrees, and over the next several days Ed and Erin persuade all 634 plaintiffs to go along.


title: Erin Brockovich (film)

text: One night Erin stops at a bar to see one of the residents, when she unexpectedly bumps into the man she's seen at the last two Hinkley events. After some uncomfortable conversation the man reveals himself to be named Charles Embry; a former PG&E employee who in his job was ordered to "destroy documents." Erin realizes Charles has been trying to confide in her, and finally hears his story. Charles tells Erin he and his cousin were both employees with PG&E Hinkley. Heartbroken, he tells her his cousin has just died, dying painfully from the poison he interacted with at PG&E. He goes on to explain that PG&E tasked him with destroying documents, but, "as it turns out, [he] wasn't a very good employee".


title: Erin Brockovich (film)

text: Embry gives Erin the documents, including a 1966 memo proving corporate headquarters knew the water was contaminated with hexavalent chromium, and advised PG&E Hinkley to keep this secret. The judge orders PG&E to pay a settlement amount of $333 million to be distributed among the plaintiffs, $5 million of which goes to the Jensens. Erin brings her boyfriend with her when she tells them about it, and he is happy when he understands what it was all for.


title: Erin Brockovich (film)

text: In the aftermath, Ed hands Erin her bonus payment for the case, but warns her he has changed the amount. She begins complaining loudly that she deserves more respect, but is astonished to find that he has paid her 2 million dollars.


title: Erin Brockovich (film)

text: "Erin Brockovich" performed well with test audiences but executives at Universal Studios were worried that audiences would be turned off by the title character's use of profane language.


title: Erin Brockovich (film)

text: "Erin Brockovich" was released on March 17, 2000, in 2,848 theaters and grossed $28.1 million on its opening weekend. It had the second-highest March opening weekend upon release, after "Liar Liar". This was also the second-highest opening weekend for a Julia Roberts film, behind "Runaway Bride". The film went on to make $126.6 million in North America and $130.7 million in the rest of the world for a worldwide total of $257.3 million.


title: Erin Brockovich (film)

text: On review website Rotten Tomatoes "Erin Brockovich" holds an approval rating of 85% based on 150 reviews, with an average rating of 7.50/10. The critics consensus reads, "Taking full advantage of Julia Roberts's considerable talent and appeal, "Erin Brockovich" overcomes a few character and plot issues to deliver a smart, thoughtful, and funny legal drama." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted score of 73 out of 100 based on 36 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews." Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.


title: Erin Brockovich (film)

text: In his review for "The New York Observer", Andrew Sarris wrote, "We get the best of independent cinema and the best of mainstream cinema all in one package. "Erin Brockovich", like "Wonder Boys" right before it, makes the year 2000 seem increasingly promising for movies". "Newsweek" magazine's David Ansen began his review with, "Julia Roberts is flat-out terrific in "Erin Brockovich"." Furthermore, he wrote, "Roberts has wasted her effervescence on many paltry projects, but she hits the jackpot this time. Erin, single mother of three, a former Miss Wichita who improbably rallies a community to take on a multi-billion-dollar corporation, is the richest role of her career, simultaneously showing off her comic, dramatic and romantic chops". "Rolling Stone" magazine's Peter Travers wrote, "Roberts shows the emotional toll on Erin as she tries to stay responsible to her children and to a job that has provided her with a first taste of self-esteem". In his review for "Entertainment Weekly", Owen Gleiberman gave the film a "B+" rating and wrote, "It's a delight to watch Roberts, with her flirtatious sparkle and undertow of melancholy, ricochet off Finney's wonderfully jaded, dry-as-beef-jerky performance as the beleaguered career attorney who knows too much about the loopholes of his profession to have much faith left in it". "Sight & Sound" magazine's Andrew O'Hehir wrote, "Perhaps the best thing about this relaxed and supremely engaging film (for my money the best work either the director or his star has ever done) is that even its near-fairytale resolution doesn't offer a magical transformation". In her review for "The Village Voice", Amy Taubin wrote, "What's pretty original about the picture is that it focuses an investigative drama based on a true story around a comic performance".


title: Erin Brockovich (film)

text: However, film critic Roger Ebert gave the film a two-star review, writing, "There is obviously a story here, but "Erin Brockovich" doesn't make it compelling. The film lacks focus and energy, the character development is facile and thin". In his review for "The New York Times", A.O. Scott wrote, "After proving, for about 40 minutes, what a marvelous actress she can be, Ms. Roberts spends the next 90 content to be a movie star. As the movie drags on, her performance swells to bursting with moral vanity and phony populism". "Time" magazine's Richard Corliss found the film to be "slick, grating and false. We bet it makes a bundle".


title: Erin Brockovich (film)

text: Julia Roberts became the first actress to win an Academy Award, BAFTA Award, Critics' Choice Movie Award, Golden Globe Award, National Board of Review Award, and Screen Actors Guild Award for a single performance. <br> Steven Soderbergh (who was nominated for Best Director) lost to himself for his work on the film "Traffic".


title: Erin Brockovich (film)

text: On her website, Brockovich says the film is "probably 98% accurate". While the general facts of the story are accurate, there are some minor discrepancies between actual events and the movie, as well as a number of controversial and disputed issues more fundamental to the case. In the film, Erin Brockovich appears to deliberately use her cleavage to seduce the water board attendant to allow her to access the documents. Brockovich has acknowledged that her cleavage may have had an influence, but denies consciously trying to influence individuals in this way. In the film, Ed Masry represents Erin Brockovich in the car crash case. In reality, it was his law partner, Jim Vititoe. Brockovich had never been Miss Wichita; she had been Miss Pacific Coast. According to Brockovich, this detail was deliberately changed by Soderbergh as he thought it was "cute" to have her be beauty queen of the region from which she came. The "not so good employee" that met Brockovich in the bar was Chuck Ebersohl. He told Erin about the documents that he and Lillian Melendez had been tasked by PG&E to destroy.


title: Erin Brockovich (film)

text: Jorge Halaby, played by Aaron Eckhart in the film, along with Brockovich's ex-husband Shawn Brown alleged that she had an affair with Masry. They also attempted to file a lawsuit against her for $310,000. Halaby was arrested and the lawyer John Jeffrey Reiner was suspended from practicing, convicted of extortion, and later disbarred.


title: Erin Brockovich (film)

text: The scientific accuracy of the film has been questioned. According to "The New York Times", scientists have suggested that their profession would have more rationally and scientifically evaluated the medical evidence that inspired Brockovich.


title: Hanging

text: Hanging is the suspension of a person by a noose or ligature around the neck. The "Oxford English Dictionary" states that hanging in this sense is "specifically to put to death by suspension by the neck", though it formerly also referred to crucifixion and death by impalement in which the body would remain "hanging". Hanging has been a common method of capital punishment since medieval times, and is the primary execution method in numerous countries and regions. The first known account of execution by hanging was in Homer's "Odyssey" (Book XXII). In this specialised meaning of the common word "hang", the past and past participle is "hanged" instead of "hung".


title: Hanging

text: Hanging is a common method of suicide in which a person applies a ligature to the neck and brings about unconsciousness and then death by suspension or partial suspension.


title: Hanging

text: There are numerous methods of hanging in execution which instigate death either by cervical fracture or by strangulation.


title: Hanging

text: The short drop is a method of hanging in which the condemned prisoner stands on a raised support such as a stool, ladder, cart, or other vehicle, with the noose around the neck. The support is then moved away, leaving the person dangling from the rope.


title: Hanging

text: Suspended by the neck, the weight of the body tightens the noose around the neck effecting strangulation and death. This typically takes 10–20 minutes.


title: Hanging

text: Before 1850, the short drop was the standard method of hanging, and it is still common in suicides and extrajudicial hangings (such as lynchings and summary executions) which do not benefit from the specialised equipment and drop-length calculation tables used in the newer methods.


title: Hanging

text: A short-drop variant is the Austro-Hungarian "pole" method, called Würgegalgen (literally: strangling gallows), in which the following steps take place:


title: Hanging

text: This method was later also adopted by the successor states, most notably by Czechoslovakia, where the "pole" method was used as the single type of execution from 1918 until the abolition of capital punishment in 1990. Nazi war criminal Karl Hermann Frank, executed in 1946 in Prague, was among approximately 1,000 condemned people executed in this manner in Czechoslovakia.


title: Hanging

text: The standard drop involves a drop of between and came into use from 1866, when the scientific details were published by Irish doctor Samuel Haughton. Its use rapidly spread to English-speaking countries and those with judicial systems of English origin.


title: Hanging

text: It was considered a humane improvement on the short drop because it was intended to be enough to break the person's neck, causing immediate unconsciousness and rapid brain death.


title: Hanging

text: This method was used to execute condemned Nazis under United States jurisdiction after the Nuremberg Trials including Joachim von Ribbentrop and Ernst Kaltenbrunner. In the execution of Ribbentrop, historian Giles MacDonogh records that: "The hangman botched the execution and the rope throttled the former foreign minister for 20 minutes before he expired." A "Life" magazine report on the execution merely says: "The trap fell open and with a sound midway between a rumble and a crash, Ribbentrop disappeared. The rope quivered for a time, then stood tautly straight."


title: Hanging

text: This process, also known as the measured drop, was introduced to Britain in 1872 by William Marwood as a scientific advance on the standard drop. Instead of everyone falling the same standard distance, the person's height and weight were used to determine how much slack would be provided in the rope so that the distance dropped would be enough to ensure that the neck was broken, but not so much that the person was decapitated. The careful placement of the eye or knot of the noose (so that the head was jerked back as the rope tightened) contributed to breaking the neck.


title: Hanging

text: Prior to 1892, the drop was between four and ten feet (about one to three metres), depending on the weight of the body, and was calculated to deliver an energy of , which fractured the neck at either the 2nd and 3rd or 4th and 5th cervical vertebrae. This force resulted in some decapitations, such as the infamous case of Black Jack Ketchum in New Mexico Territory in 1901, owing to a significant weight gain while in custody not having been factored into the drop calculations. Between 1892 and 1913, the length of the drop was shortened to avoid decapitation. After 1913, other factors were also taken into account, and the energy delivered was reduced to about . The decapitation of Eva Dugan during a botched hanging in 1930 led the state of Arizona to switch to the gas chamber as its primary execution method, on the grounds that it was believed more humane. One of the more recent decapitations as a result of the long drop occurred when Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti was hanged in Iraq in 2007. Accidental decapitation also occurred during the 1962 hanging of Arthur Lucas, one of the last two people to be put to death in Canada.


title: Hanging

text: Nazis executed under British jurisdiction, including Josef Kramer, Fritz Klein, Irma Grese and Elisabeth Volkenrath, were hanged by Albert Pierrepoint using the variable-drop method devised by Marwood. The record speed for a British long-drop hanging was seven seconds from the executioner entering the cell to the drop. Speed was considered to be important in the British system as it reduced the condemned's mental distress.


title: Hanging

text: Hanging is a common suicide method. The materials necessary for suicide by hanging are readily available to the average person, compared with firearms or poisons. Full suspension is not required, and for this reason, hanging is especially commonplace among suicidal prisoners (see suicide watch). A type of hanging comparable to full suspension hanging may be obtained by self-strangulation using a ligature around the neck and the partial weight of the body (partial suspension) to tighten the ligature. When a suicidal hanging involves partial suspension the deceased is found to have both feet touching the ground, e.g., they are kneeling, crouching or standing. Partial suspension or partial weight-bearing on the ligature is sometimes used, particularly in prisons, mental hospitals or other institutions, where full suspension support is difficult to devise, because high ligature points (e.g., hooks or pipes) have been removed.


title: Hanging

text: In Canada, hanging is the most common method of suicide, and in the U.S., hanging is the second most common method, after self-inflicted gunshot wounds. In the United Kingdom, where firearms are less easily available, in 2001 hanging was the most common method among men and the second most commonplace among women (after poisoning).


title: Hanging

text: Those who survive a suicide-via-hanging attempt, whether due to breakage of the cord or ligature point, or being discovered and cut down, face a range of serious injuries, including cerebral anoxia (which can lead to permanent brain damage), laryngeal fracture, cervical spine fracture (which may cause paralysis), tracheal fracture, pharyngeal laceration, and carotid artery injury.


title: Hanging

text: There are some suggestions that the Vikings practiced hanging as human sacrifices to Odin, to honour Odin's own sacrifice of hanging himself from Yggdrasil. In Northern Europe, it is widely speculated that the Iron Age bog bodies, many who show signs of having been hanged were examples of human sacrifice to the gods.


title: Hanging

text: The cause of death in hanging depends on the conditions related to the event. When the body is released from a relatively high position, the major cause of death is severe trauma to the upper cervical spine. The injuries produced are highly variable. One study showed that only a small minority of a series of judicial hangings produced fractures to the cervical spine (6 out of 34 cases studied), with half of these fractures (3 out of 34) being the classic "hangman's fracture" (bilateral fractures of the pars interarticularis of the C2 vertebra). The location of the knot of the hanging rope is a major factor in determining the mechanics of cervical spine injury, with a submental knot (hangman's knot under the chin) being the only location capable of producing the sudden, straightforward hyperextension injury that causes the classic "hangman's fracture".


title: Hanging

text: According to "Historical and biomechanical aspects of hangman's fracture", the phrase in the usual execution order, ""hanged by the neck until dead,"" was necessary. By the late 19th century that methodical study enabled authorities to routinely employ hanging in ways that would predictably kill the victim quickly.


title: Hanging

text: The side, or subaural knot, has been shown to produce other, more complex injuries, with one thoroughly studied case producing only ligamentous injuries to the cervical spine and bilateral vertebral artery disruptions, but no major vertebral fractures or crush injuries to the spinal cord. Death from a "hangman's fracture" occurs mainly when the applied force is severe enough to also cause a severe subluxation of the C2 and C3 vertebra that crushes the spinal cord and/or disrupts the vertebral arteries. Hangman's fractures from other hyperextension injuries (the most common being unrestrained motor vehicle accidents and falls or diving injuries where the face or chin suddenly strike an immovable object) are frequently survivable if the applied force does not cause a severe subluxation of C2 on C3.


title: Hanging

text: In the absence of fracture and dislocation, occlusion of blood vessels becomes the major cause of death, rather than asphyxiation. Obstruction of venous drainage of the brain via occlusion of the internal jugular veins leads to cerebral oedema and then cerebral ischemia. The face will typically become engorged and cyanotic (turned blue through lack of oxygen). There will be the classic sign of strangulation, petechiae, little blood marks on the face and in the eyes from burst blood capillaries. The tongue may protrude.


title: Hanging

text: Compromise of the cerebral blood flow may occur by obstruction of the carotid arteries, even though their obstruction requires far more force than the obstruction of jugular veins, since they are seated deeper and they contain blood in much higher pressure compared to the jugular veins. Where death has occurred through carotid artery obstruction or cervical fracture, the face will typically be pale in colour and not show petechiae. Many reports and pictures exist of actual short-drop hangings that seem to show that the person died quickly, while others indicate a slow and agonising death by strangulation.


title: Hanging

text: When cerebral circulation is severely compromised by any mechanism, arterial or venous, death occurs over four or more minutes from cerebral hypoxia, although the heart may continue to beat for some period after the brain can no longer be resuscitated. The time of death in such cases is a matter of convention. In judicial hangings, death is pronounced at cardiac arrest, which may occur at times from several minutes up to 15 minutes or longer after hanging. During suspension, once the prisoner has lapsed into unconsciousness, rippling movements of the body and limbs may occur for some time which are usually attributed to nervous and muscular reflexes. In Britain, it was normal to leave the body suspended for an hour to ensure death.


title: Hanging

text: After death, the body typically shows marks of suspension: bruising and rope marks on the neck. Sphincters will relax spontaneously and urine and faeces will be evacuated. Forensic experts may often be able to tell if hanging is suicide or homicide, as each leaves a distinctive ligature mark. One of the hints they use is the hyoid bone. If broken, it often means the person has been murdered by manual choking.


title: Hanging

text: Hanging has been a method of capital punishment in many countries, and is still used by many countries to this day. Long-drop hanging is mainly used by former British colonies, while short-drop and suspension hanging is common in Iran.


title: Hanging

text: Capital punishment was a part of the legal system of Australia from the establishment of New South Wales as a British penal colony, until 1985, by which time all Australian states and territories had abolished the death penalty; in practice, the last execution in Australia was the hanging of Ronald Ryan on 3 February 1967, in Victoria.


title: Hanging

text: During the 19th century, crimes that could carry a death sentence included burglary, sheep theft, forgery, sexual assaults, murder and manslaughter. During the 19th century, there were roughly eighty people hanged every year throughout the Australian colonies for these crimes.


title: Hanging

text: Death by hanging was the customary method of capital punishment in Brazil throughout its history. Some important national heroes like Tiradentes (1792) were killed by hanging. The last man executed in Brazil was the slave Francisco, in 1876. The death penalty was abolished for all crimes, except for those committed under extraordinary circumstances such as war or military law, in 1890.


title: Hanging

text: Bulgaria's national hero, Vasil Levski, was executed by hanging by the Ottoman court in Sofia in 1873. Every year since Bulgaria's liberation, thousands come with flowers on the date of his death, 19 February, to his monument where the gallows stood. The last execution was in 1989, and the death penalty was abolished for all crimes in 1998.


title: Hanging

text: Historically, hanging was the only method of execution used in Canada and was in use as possible punishment for all murders until 1961, when murders were reclassified into capital and non-capital offences. The death penalty was restricted to apply only for certain offences to the National Defence Act in 1976 and was completely abolished in 1998. The last hangings in Canada took place on 11 December 1962.


title: Hanging

text: In 1955, Egypt hanged three Israelis on charges of spying. In 1982 Egypt hanged three civilians convicted of the assassination of Anwar Sadat. In 2004, Egypt hanged five militants on charges of trying to kill the Prime Minister. To this day, hanging remains the standard method of capital punishment in Egypt, which executes more people each year than any other African country.


title: Hanging

text: In the territories occupied by Nazi Germany from 1939 to 1945, strangulation hanging was a preferred means of public execution, although more criminal executions were performed by guillotine than hanging. The most commonly sentenced were partisans and black marketeers, whose bodies were usually left hanging for long periods. There are also numerous reports of concentration camp inmates being hanged. Hanging was continued in post-war Germany in the British and US Occupation Zones under their jurisdiction, and for Nazi war criminals, until well after (western) Germany itself had abolished the death penalty by the German constitution as adopted in 1949. West Berlin was not subject to the "Grundgesetz" (Basic Law) and abolished the death penalty in 1951. The German Democratic Republic abolished the death penalty in 1987. The last execution ordered by a West German court was carried out by guillotine in Moabit prison in 1949. The last hanging in Germany was the one ordered of several war criminals in Landsberg am Lech on 7 June 1951. The last known execution in East Germany was in 1981 by a pistol shot to the neck.


title: Hanging

text: The prime minister of Hungary, during the 1956 Revolution, Imre Nagy, was secretly tried, executed by hanging, and buried unceremoniously by the new Soviet-backed Hungarian government, in 1958. Nagy was later publicly exonerated by Hungary. Capital punishment was abolished for all crimes in 1990.


title: Hanging

text: All executions in India since independence have been carried out by hanging, although the law provides for military executions to be carried out by firing squad. In 1949, Nathuram Godse, who had been sentenced to death for the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, was the first person to be executed by hanging in independent India.


title: Hanging

text: The Supreme Court of India has suggested that capital punishment should be given only in the "rarest of rare cases".


title: Hanging

text: Since 2001, eight people have been executed in India. Dhananjoy Chatterjee, the 1991 rapist and murderer was executed on 14 August 2004 in Alipore Jail, Kolkata. Ajmal Kasab, the lone surviving terrorist of the 2008 Mumbai attacks was executed on 21 November 2012 in Yerwada Central Jail, Pune. The Supreme Court of India had previously rejected his mercy plea, which was then rejected by the President of India. He was hanged one week later. Afzal Guru, a terrorist found guilty of conspiracy in the December 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament, was executed by hanging in Tihar Jail, Delhi on 9 February 2013. Yakub Memon was convicted over his involvement in the 1993 Bombay bombings by Special Terrorist and Disruptive Activities court on 27 July 2007. His appeals and petitions for clemency were all rejected and he was finally executed by hanging on 30 July 2015 in Nagpur jail. In March 2020, four prisoners convicted of rape and murder were executed by hanging in Tihar Jail.


title: Hanging

text: Death by hanging is the primary means of capital punishment in Iran, which carries out one of the highest numbers of annual executions in the world. The method used is the short drop, which does not break the neck of the condemned, but rather causes a slower death due to strangulation. It is legal for murder, rape, and drug trafficking unless the criminal pays diyya to the victim's family, thus attaining their forgiveness (see Sharia). If the presiding judge deems the case to be "causing public outrage", he can order the hanging to take place in public at the spot where the crime was committed, typically from a mobile telescoping crane which hoists the condemned high into the air. On 19 July 2005, two boys, Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni, aged 15 and 17 respectively, who had been convicted of the rape of a 13-year-old boy, were hanged at Edalat (Justice) Square in Mashhad, on charges of homosexuality and rape. On 15 August 2004, a 16-year-old girl, Atefeh Sahaaleh (also called Atefeh Rajabi), was executed for having committed "acts incompatible with chastity".


title: Hanging

text: At dawn on 27 July 2008, the Iranian government executed 29 people at Evin Prison in Tehran. On 2 December 2008, an unnamed man was hanged for murder at Kazeroun Prison, just moments after he was pardoned by the murder victim's family. He was quickly cut down and rushed to a hospital, where he was successfully revived.


title: Hanging

text: The conviction and hanging of Reyhaneh Jabbari caused international uproar as she was sentenced to death in 2009 and hanged on 25 October 2014 for murdering a former intelligence officer; according to Jabbari's testimony she stabbed him during an attempt at rape and then another person killed him.


title: Hanging

text: Hanging was used under the regime of Saddam Hussein, but was suspended along with capital punishment on 10 June 2003, when a coalition led by the United States invaded and overthrew the previous regime. The death penalty was reinstated on 8 August 2004.


title: Hanging

text: In September 2005, three murderers were the first people to be executed since the restoration. Then on 9 March 2006, an official of Iraq's Supreme Judicial Council confirmed that Iraqi authorities had executed the first insurgents by hanging.


title: Hanging

text: Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death by hanging for crimes against humanity on 5 November 2006, and was executed on 30 December 2006 at approximately 6:00 a.m. local time. During the drop, there was an audible crack indicating that his neck was broken, a successful example of a long-drop hanging.


title: Hanging

text: Barzan Ibrahim, the head of the Mukhabarat, Saddam's security agency, and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, former chief judge, were executed on 15 January 2007, also by the long-drop method, but Barzan was decapitated by the rope at the end of his fall.


title: Hanging

text: Former vice-president Taha Yassin Ramadan had been sentenced to life in prison on 5 November 2006, but the sentence was changed to death by hanging on 12 February 2007. He was the fourth and final man to be executed for the 1982 crimes against humanity on 20 March 2007. The execution went smoothly.


title: Hanging

text: At the Anfal genocide trial, Saddam's cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid ("alias" Chemical Ali), former defence minister Sultan Hashim Ahmed al-Tay, and former deputy Hussein Rashid Mohammed were sentenced to hang for their role in the Al-Anfal Campaign against the Kurds on 24 June 2007. Al-Majid was sentenced to death three more times: once for the 1991 suppression of a Shi'a uprising along with Abdul-Ghani Abdul Ghafur on 2 December 2008; once for the 1999 crackdown in the assassination of Grand Ayatollah Mohammad al-Sadr on 2 March 2009; and once on 17 January 2010 for the gassing of the Kurds in 1988; he was hanged on 25 January.


title: Hanging

text: On 26 October 2010, Saddam's top minister Tariq Aziz was sentenced to hang for persecuting the members of rival Shi'a political parties. His sentence was commuted to indefinite imprisonment after Iraqi president Jalal Talabani did not sign his execution order and he died in prison in 2015.


title: Hanging

text: On 14 July 2011, Sultan Hashim Ahmed al-Tay and two of Saddam's half-brothers – Sabawi Ibrahim al-Tikriti and Watban Ibrahim al-Tikriti—both condemned to death on 11 March 2009 for the role in the executions of 42 traders who were accused of manipulating food prices—were handed over to the Iraqi authorities for execution.


title: Hanging

text: It is alleged that Iraq's government keeps the execution rate secret, and hundreds may be carried out every year. In 2007, Amnesty International stated that 900 people were at "imminent risk" of execution in Iraq.


title: Hanging

text: Although Israel has provisions in its criminal law to use the death penalty for extraordinary crimes, it has been used only twice, and only one of those executions was by hanging. On 31 May 1962, Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann was executed by hanging.


title: Hanging

text: On 23 December 1948, Hideki Tojo, Kenji Doihara, Akira Mutō, Iwane Matsui, Seishirō Itagaki, Kōki Hirota, and Heitaro Kimura were hanged at Sugamo Prison by the U.S. occupation authorities in Ikebukuro in Allied-occupied Japan for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace during the Asian-Pacific theatre of World War II.


title: Hanging

text: On 27 February 2004, the mastermind of the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, Shoko Asahara, was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. On 25 December 2006, serial killer Hiroaki Hidaka and three others were hanged in Japan. Long-drop hanging is the method of carrying out judicial capital punishment on civilians in Japan, as in the cases of Norio Nagayama, Mamoru Takuma, and Tsutomu Miyazaki. In 2018 Shoko Asahara and several of his cult members were hanged for committing the 1995 sarin gas attack.


title: Hanging

text: Death by hanging is the traditional method of capital punishment in Jordan. On 14 August 1993, Jordan hanged two Jordanians convicted of spying for Israel. Sajida al-Rishawi, "The 4th bomber" of the 2005 Amman bombings, was executed by hanging alongside Ziad al-Karbouly on 4 February 2015 in retribution for the immolation of Jordanian pilot Muath Al-Kasasbeh.


title: Hanging

text: Lebanon hanged two men in 1998 for murdering a man and his sister. However, capital punishment ended up being altogether suspended in Lebanon, as a result of staunch opposition by activists and some political factions.


title: Hanging

text: On 16 February 1979, seven men convicted of the ritual killing of the popular Kru traditional singer Moses Tweh, were publicly hanged at dawn in Harper.


title: Hanging

text: Hanging is the traditional method of capital punishment in Malaysia and has been used to execute people convicted of murder and drug trafficking. The Barlow and Chambers execution was carried out as a result of new tighter drug regulations.


title: Hanging

text: The last person executed by hanging in Portugal was Francisco Matos Lobos on 16 April 1842. Before that, it had been a common death penalty.


title: Hanging

text: Hanging was commonly practised in the Russian Empire during the rule of the Romanov Dynasty as an alternative to impalement, which was used in the 15th and 16th centuries.


title: Hanging

text: Hanging was abolished in 1868 by Alexander II after serfdom, but was restored by the time of his death and his assassins were hanged. While those sentenced to death for murder were usually pardoned and sentences commuted to life imprisonment, those guilty of high treason were usually executed. This also included the Grand Duchy of Finland and Kingdom of Poland under the Russian crown. Taavetti Lukkarinen became the last Finn to be executed this way. He was hanged for espionage and high treason in 1916.


title: Hanging

text: The hanging was usually performed by short drop in public. The gallows were usually either a stout nearby tree branch, as in the case of Lukkarinen, or a makeshift gallows constructed for the purpose.


title: Hanging

text: After the October Revolution in 1917, capital punishment was, on paper, abolished, but continued to be used unabated against people perceived to be enemies of the regime. Under the Bolsheviks, most executions were performed by shooting, either by firing squad or by a single firearm. In 1943, hanging was restored primarily for German servicemen and native collaborators for atrocities committed against Soviet POWs and civilians. The last to be hanged were Andrey Vlasov and his companions in 1946.


title: Hanging

text: In Singapore, long-drop hanging is currently used as a mandatory punishment for crimes such as drug trafficking, murder and some types of kidnapping. It has also been used for punishing those convicted of unauthorised discharging of firearms.


title: Hanging

text: Hanging was abolished in Sri Lanka in 1956, but in 1959 it was brought back and later halted in 1978. In 1975, the day before the execution of Maru Sira, he had been overdosed by the prison guards to prevent him from escaping. On the day of his execution he was unconscious, so when he was brought to the gallows, he was slumped over on the trapdoor with a noose around his neck, and when the executioner pulled the lever, his execution was botched and he strangled.


title: Hanging

text: Syria has publicly hanged people, such as two Jews in 1952, Israeli spy Eli Cohen in 1965, and a number of Jews accused of spying in 1969.


title: Hanging

text: According to a 19th-century report, members of the Alawite sect centred on Lattakia in Syria had a particular aversion towards being hanged, and the family of the condemned was willing to pay "considerable sums" to ensure its relations were impaled, instead of being hanged. As far as Burckhardt could make out, this attitude was based upon the Alawites' idea that the soul ought to leave the body through the mouth, rather than leave it in any other fashion.


title: Hanging

text: As a form of judicial execution in England, hanging is thought to date from the Anglo-Saxon period. Records of the names of British hangmen begin with Thomas de Warblynton in the 1360s; complete records extend from the 16th century to the last hangmen, Robert Leslie Stewart and Harry Allen, who conducted the last British executions in 1964.


title: Hanging

text: Until 1868 hangings were performed in public. In London, the traditional site was at Tyburn, a settlement west of the City on the main road to Oxford, which was used on eight hanging days a year, though before 1865, executions had been transferred to the street outside Newgate Prison, Old Bailey, now the site of the Central Criminal Court.


title: Hanging

text: Three British subjects were hanged after World War II after having been convicted of having helped Nazi Germany in its war against Britain. John Amery, the son of prominent British politician Leo Amery, became an expatriate in the 1930s, moving to France. He became involved in pre-war fascist politics, remained in what became Vichy France following France's defeat by Germany in 1940 and eventually went to Germany and later the German puppet state in Italy headed by Benito Mussolini. Captured by Italian partisans at the end of the war and handed over to British authorities, Amery was accused of having made propaganda broadcasts for the Nazis and of having attempted to recruit British prisoners of war for a Waffen SS regiment later known as the British Free Corps. Amery pleaded guilty to treason charges on 28 November 1945 and was hanged at Wandsworth Prison on 19 December 1945. William Joyce, an American-born Irishman who had lived in Britain and possessed a British passport, had been involved in pre-war fascist politics in the UK, fled to Nazi Germany just before the war began to avoid arrest by British authorities and became a naturalised German citizen. He made propaganda broadcasts for the Nazis, becoming infamous under the nickname Lord Haw Haw. Captured by British forces in May 1945, he was tried for treason later that year. Although Joyce's defence argued that he was by birth American and thus not subject to being tried for treason, the prosecution successfully argued that Joyce's pre-war British passport meant that he was a subject of the British Crown and he was convicted. After his appeals failed, he was hanged at Wandsworth Prison on 3 January 1946. Theodore Schurch, a British soldier captured by the Nazis who then began working for the Italian and German intelligence services by acting as a spy and informer who would be placed among other British prisoners, was arrested in Rome in March 1945 and tried under the Treachery Act 1940. After his conviction, he was hanged at HM Prison Pentonville on 4 January 1946.


title: Hanging

text: The Homicide Act 1957 created the new offence of capital murder, punishable by death, with all other murders being punishable by life imprisonment.


title: Hanging

text: In 1965, Parliament passed the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act, temporarily abolishing capital punishment for murder for five years. The Act was renewed in 1969, making the abolition permanent. With the passage of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and the Human Rights Act 1998, the death penalty was officially abolished for all crimes in both civilian and military cases. Following its complete abolition, the gallows were removed from Wandsworth Prison, where they remained in full working order until that year.


title: Hanging

text: The last woman to be hanged was Ruth Ellis on 13 July 1955, by Albert Pierrepoint who was a prominent hangman in the 20th century in England. The last hangings in Britain took place in 1964, when Peter Anthony Allen was executed at Walton Prison in Liverpool. Gwynne Owen Evans was executed by Harry Allen at Strangeways Prison in Manchester. Both were executed for the murder of John Alan West.


title: Hanging

text: The hangman's noose was one of the various banishments the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony applied to enforce religious and intellectual conformity on the whole community. The best known hanging carried out by the Puritans, Mary Dyer was one of the four executed Quakers known as the Boston martyrs.


title: Hanging

text: Capital punishment in the U.S. varies from state to state; it is outlawed in some states but used in most others. However, the death penalty under federal law is applicable in every state. Hanging is no longer used as a method of execution.


title: Hanging

text: When Black pastor Denmark Vesey of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church was suspected of plotting to launch a slave rebellion in Charleston, South Carolina in 1822, 35 people, including Vesey, were judged guilty by a city-appointed court and were subsequently hanged, and the church was burned down.


title: Hanging

text: The largest mass execution in the United States, of 38 Sioux Indians sentenced to death after being charged for engaging in massacres of white settlers, was carried out by hanging in Mankato, Minnesota in 1862. Originally, 303 had been sentenced to hang, but the convictions were reviewed by President Abraham Lincoln and the sentences of all but 38 were commuted. A total of 40 suspected Unionists were hanged in Gainesville, Texas in October 1862. On 7 July 1865, four people involved in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln—Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, David Herold, and George Atzerodt—were hanged at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C.


title: Hanging

text: While rope is most commonly used for hanging, chains had also been used (mainly during the colonial era), the first being a slave after the New York Slave Revolt of 1712. The last hanging in chains was in 1913, of John Marshall in West Virginia for murder. The last public hanging in the United States (not including lynching, one of the last of which was Michael Donald in 1981) took place on 14 August 1936, in Owensboro, Kentucky. Rainey Bethea was executed for the rape and murder of 70-year-old Lischa Edwards. The execution was presided over by the first female sheriff in Kentucky, Florence Shoemaker Thompson.


title: Hanging

text: In California, Clinton Duffy, who served as warden of San Quentin State Prison between 1940 and 1952, presided over ninety executions. He began to oppose the death penalty, and after his retirement, wrote a memoir entitled "Eighty-Eight Men and Two Women" in support of the movement to abolish the death penalty. The book documents several hangings gone wrong and describes how they led his predecessor, Warden James B. Holohan, to persuade the California Legislature to replace hanging with the gas chamber in 1937.


title: Hanging

text: Various methods of capital punishment have been replaced by lethal injection in most states and the federal government. Many states that offered hanging as an option have since eliminated the method. Condemned murderer Victor Feguer became the last inmate to be executed by hanging in the state of Iowa on 15 March 1963. Hanging was the preferred method of execution for capital murder cases in Iowa until 1965, when the death penalty was abolished and replaced with life imprisonment without parole. Barton Kay Kirkham was the last person to be hanged in Utah, preferring it over execution by firing squad. No subsequent inmate in Utah had been hanged by the time the option was replaced with lethal injection in 1980. Laws in Delaware were changed in 1986 to specify lethal injection, except for those convicted before 1986 (who were still allowed to choose hanging). If a choice was not made, or the convict refused to choose injection, then hanging would become the default method. This was the case in the 1996 execution of Billy Bailey, the most recent hanging in American history; since then, no Delaware prisoner fit the category, and the state's gallows were later dismantled.


title: Hanging

text: The "Upright Jerker" is a method of hanging, that originated from the United States in the late 19th century, where the person to be hanged is jerked into the air by weights and pulleys. It proved to be ineffective at breaking the neck of the condemned and use of the method ceased in late 1930s.


title: Hanging

text: A completely different principle of hanging is to hang the convicted person from their legs, rather than from their neck, either as a form of torture, or as an execution method. In late medieval Germany, this came to be primarily associated with Jewish thieves, called the "Judenstrafe". The jurist Ulrich Tengler, in his highly influential "Layenspiegel" from 1509, describes the procedure as follows, in the section "Von Juden straff":


title: Hanging

text: In Spain 1449, during a mob attack against the Marranos (Jews nominally converted to Christianity), the Jews resisted, but lost and several of them were hanged up by the feet. The first attested German case for a Jew being hanged by the feet is from 1296, in present-day Soultzmatt. Some other historical examples of this type of hanging within the German context are one Jew in Hennegau 1326, two Jews hanged in Frankfurt 1444, one in Halle in 1462, one in Dortmund 1486, one in Hanau 1499, one in Breslau 1505, one in Württemberg 1553, one in Bergen 1588, one in Öttingen 1611, one in Frankfurt 1615 and again in 1661, and one condemned to this punishment in Prussia in 1637.


title: Hanging

text: The details of the cases vary widely: In the 1444 Frankfurt cases and the 1499 Hanau case, the dogs were dead prior to being hanged, and in the late 1615 and 1661 cases in Frankfurt, the Jews (and dogs) were merely kept in this torture for half an hour, before being garroted from below. In the 1588 Bergen case, all three victims were left hanging till they were dead, ranging from 6 to 8 days after being hanged. In the Dortmund 1486 case, the dogs bit the Jew to death while hanging. In the 1611 Öttingen case, the Jew "Jacob the Tall" thought to blow up the "Deutsche Ordenhaus" with gunpowder after having burgled it. He was strung up between two dogs, and a large fire was made close to him, and he expired after half an hour under this torture. In the 1553 Württemberg case, the Jew chose to convert to Christianity after hanging like this for 24 hours; he was then given the mercy to be hanged in the ordinary manner, from the neck, and without the dogs beside him. In the 1462 Halle case, the Jew Abraham also converted after 24 hours hanging upside down, and a priest went up on a ladder and baptised him. For two more days, Abraham was left hanging, while the priest argued with the city council that a true Christian should not be punished in this way. On the third day, Abraham was granted a reprieve, and was taken down, but died 20 days later in the local hospital having meanwhile suffered in extreme pain. In the 1637 case, where the Jew had murdered a Christian jeweller, the appeal to the empress was successful, and out of mercy, the Jew was condemned to be merely pinched with glowing pincers, have hot lead dripped into his wounds, and then be broken alive on the wheel.


title: Hanging

text: Some of the reported cases may be myths, or wandering stories. The 1326 Hennegau case, for example, deviates from the others in that the Jew was not a thief, but was suspected (even though he was a convert to Christianity) of having struck an al fresco painting of Virgin Mary, so that blood had begun to seep down the wall from the painting. Even under all degrees of judicial torture, the Jew denied performing this sacrilegious act, and was therefore exonerated. Then a brawny smith demanded from him a trial by combat, because, supposedly, in a dream the Virgin herself had besought the smith to do so. The court accepted the smith's challenge, he easily won the combat against the Jew, who was duly hanged up by the feet between two dogs. To add to the injury, one let him be slowly roasted as well as hanged. This is a very similar story to one told in "France", in which a young Jew threw a lance at the head of a statue of the Virgin, so that blood spurted out of it. There was inadequate evidence for a normal trial, but a frail old man asked for trial by combat, and bested the young Jew. The Jew confessed his crime, and was hanged by his feet between two mastiffs.


title: Hanging

text: The features of the earliest attested case, that of a Jewish thief hanged by the feet in Soultzmatt in 1296 are also rather divergent from the rest. The Jew managed somehow, after he had been left to die, to twitch his body in such a manner that he could hoist himself up on the gallows and free himself. At that time, his feet were so damaged that he was unable to escape, and when he was discovered 8 days after he had been hanged, he was strangled to death by the townspeople.


title: Hanging

text: As late as in 1699 Celle, the courts were sufficiently horrified at how the Jewish leader of a robber gang (condemned to be hanged in the normal manner) declared blasphemies against Christianity, that they made a ruling on the "post mortem" treatment of Jonas Meyer. After 3 days, his corpse was cut down, his tongue cut out, and his body was hanged up again, but this time from its feet.


title: Hanging

text: Guido Kisch writes that the first instance he knows where a person in Germany was hanged up by his feet between two dogs until he died occurred about 1048, some 250 years earlier than the first attested Jewish case. This was a knight called Arnold, who had murdered his lord; the story is contained in Adam of Bremens "History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen" Another example of a non-Jew who suffered this punishment as a torture, in 1196 Richard, Count of Acerra, was one of those executed by Henry VI in the suppression of the rebelling Sicilians:


title: Hanging

text: A couple of centuries earlier, in France 991, a viscount Walter nominally owing his allegiance to the French King Hugh Capet chose, on instigation of his wife, to join the rebellion under Odo I, Count of Blois. When Odo found out he had to abandon Melun after all, Walter was duly hanged before the gates, whereas his wife, the fomentor of treason, was hanged by her feet, causing much merriment and jeers from Hugh's soldiers as her clothes fell downwards revealing her naked body, although it is not wholly clear if she died in that manner.


title: Hanging

text: During Queen Elizabeth I's reign, the following was written concerning those who stole a ship from the Royal Navy:


title: Hanging

text: In 1713, Juraj Jánošík, a semi-legendary Slovak outlaw and folk hero, was sentenced to be hanged from his left rib. He was left to slowly die.


title: Hanging

text: The German physician Gottlob Schober (1670–1739), who worked in Russia from 1712, notes that a person could hang from the ribs for about three days prior to expiring, his primary pain being that of extreme thirst. He thought this degree of insensitivity was something peculiar to the Russian mentality.


title: Hanging

text: The Dutch in Suriname were also in the habit of hanging a slave from the ribs, a custom amongst the African tribes from whom they were originally purchased. John Gabriel Stedman stayed in South America from 1772 to 1777 and described the method as told by a witness:


title: Hanging

text: The proper, traditional past tense and past participle form of the verb "hang", in this sense, is (to be) "hanged". Some dictionaries list only "hanged", whereas others show both forms. For example, "people are hanged; meat is hung".


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While it initially manufactured its own processors, the company later outsourced its manufacturing, a practice known as going fabless, after GlobalFoundries was spun off in 2009. AMD's main products include microprocessors, motherboard chipsets, embedded processors, graphics processors, and FPGAs for servers, workstations, personal computers, and embedded system applications.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: Advanced Micro Devices was formally incorporated by Jerry Sanders, along with seven of his colleagues from Fairchild Semiconductor, on May 1, 1969. Sanders, an electrical engineer who was the director of marketing at Fairchild, had, like many Fairchild executives, grown frustrated with the increasing lack of support, opportunity, and flexibility within the company. He later decided to leave to start his own semiconductor company, following the footsteps of Robert Noyce (developer of the first silicon integrated circuit at Fairchild in 1959) and Gordon Moore, who together founded the semiconductor company Intel in July 1968.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: In September 1969, AMD moved from its temporary location in Santa Clara to Sunnyvale, California. To immediately secure a customer base, AMD initially became a second source supplier of microchips designed by Fairchild and National Semiconductor. AMD first focused on producing logic chips. The company guaranteed quality control to United States Military Standard, an advantage in the early computer industry since unreliability in microchips was a distinct problem that customers – including computer manufacturers, the telecommunications industry, and instrument manufacturers – wanted to avoid.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: In November 1969, the company manufactured its first product: the Am9300, a 4-bit MSI shift register, which began selling in 1970. Also in 1970, AMD produced its first proprietary product, the Am2501 logic counter, which was highly successful. Its best-selling product in 1971 was the Am2505, the fastest multiplier available.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: In 1971, AMD entered the RAM chip market, beginning with the Am3101, a 64-bit bipolar RAM. That year AMD also greatly increased the sales volume of its linear integrated circuits, and by year-end the company's total annual sales reached US$4.6 million.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: AMD went public in September 1972. The company was a second source for Intel MOS/LSI circuits by 1973, with products such as Am14/1506 and Am14/1507, dual 100-bit dynamic shift registers. By 1975, AMD was producing 212 products – of which 49 were proprietary, including the Am9102 (a static N-channel 1024-bit RAM) and three low-power Schottky MSI circuits: Am25LS07, Am25LS08, and Am25LS09.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: Intel had created the first microprocessor, its 4-bit 4004, in 1971. By 1975, AMD entered the microprocessor market with the Am9080, a reverse-engineered clone of the Intel 8080, and the Am2900 bit-slice microprocessor family. When Intel began installing microcode in its microprocessors in 1976, it entered into a cross-licensing agreement with AMD, which was granted a copyright license to the microcode in its microprocessors and peripherals, effective October 1976.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: In 1977, AMD entered into a joint venture with Siemens, a German engineering conglomerate wishing to enhance its technology expertise and enter the American market. Siemens purchased 20% of AMD's stock, giving the company an infusion of cash to increase its product lines. The two companies also jointly established Advanced Micro Computers (AMC), located in Silicon Valley and in Germany, allowing AMD to enter the microcomputer development and manufacturing field, in particular based on AMD's second-source Zilog Z8000 microprocessors. When the two companies' vision for Advanced Micro Computers diverged, AMD bought out Siemens' stake in the American division in 1979. AMD closed Advanced Micro Computers in late 1981 after switching focus to manufacturing second-source Intel x86 microprocessors.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: Total sales in fiscal year 1978 topped $100 million, and in 1979, AMD debuted on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1979, production also began on AMD's new semiconductor fabrication plant in Austin, Texas; the company already had overseas assembly facilities in Penang and Manila, and began construction on a fabrication plant in San Antonio in 1981. In 1980, AMD began supplying semiconductor products for telecommunications, an industry undergoing rapid expansion and innovation.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: Intel had introduced the first x86 microprocessors in 1978. In 1981, IBM created its PC, and wanted Intel's x86 processors, but only under the condition that Intel also provide a second-source manufacturer for its patented x86 microprocessors. Intel and AMD entered into a 10-year technology exchange agreement, first signed in October 1981 and formally executed in February 1982. The terms of the agreement were that each company could acquire the right to become a second-source manufacturer of semiconductor products developed by the other; that is, each party could "earn" the right to manufacture and sell a product developed by the other, if agreed to, by exchanging the manufacturing rights to a product of equivalent technical complexity. The technical information and licenses needed to make and sell a part would be exchanged for a royalty to the developing company. The 1982 agreement also extended the 1976 AMD–Intel cross-licensing agreement through 1995. The agreement included the right to invoke arbitration of disagreements, and after five years the right of either party to end the agreement with one year's notice. The main result of the 1982 agreement was that AMD became a second-source manufacturer of Intel's x86 microprocessors and related chips, and Intel provided AMD with database tapes for its 8086, 80186, and 80286 chips. However, in the event of a bankruptcy or takeover of AMD, the cross-licensing agreement would be effectively cancelled.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: Beginning in 1982, AMD began volume-producing second-source Intel-licensed 8086, 8088, 80186, and 80188 processors, and by 1984, its own Am286 clone of Intel's 80286 processor, for the rapidly growing market of IBM PCs and IBM clones. It also continued its successful concentration on proprietary bipolar chips. In 1983, it introduced INT.STD.1000, the highest manufacturing quality standard in the industry.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: The company continued to spend greatly on research and development, and created the world's first 512K EPROM in 1984. That year, AMD was listed in the book "The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America", and later made the "Fortune" 500 list for the first time in 1985.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: By mid-1985, the microchip market experienced a severe downturn, mainly due to long-term aggressive trade practices (dumping) from Japan, but also due to a crowded and non-innovative chip market in the United States. AMD rode out the mid-1980s crisis by aggressively innovating and modernizing, devising the Liberty Chip program of designing and manufacturing one new chip or chipset per week for 52 weeks in fiscal year 1986, and by heavily lobbying the U.S. government until sanctions and restrictions were put in place to prevent predatory Japanese pricing. During this time, AMD withdrew from the DRAM market, and made some headway into the CMOS market, which it had lagged in entering, having focused instead on bipolar chips.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: AMD had some success in the mid-1980s with the AMD7910 and AMD7911 "World Chip" FSK modem, one of the first multi-standard devices that covered both Bell and CCITT tones at up to 1200 baud half duplex or 300/300 full duplex. Beginning in 1986, AMD embraced the perceived shift toward RISC with their own AMD Am29000 (29k) processor; the 29k survived as an embedded processor. The company also increased its EPROM memory market share in the late 1980s. Throughout the 1980s, AMD was a second-source supplier of Intel x86 processors. In 1991, it introduced its own 386-compatible Am386, an AMD-designed chip. Creating its own chips, AMD began to compete directly with Intel.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: AMD had a large, successful flash memory business, even during the dotcom bust. In 2003, to divest some manufacturing and aid its overall cash flow, which was under duress from aggressive microprocessor competition from Intel, AMD spun off its flash memory business and manufacturing into Spansion, a joint venture with Fujitsu, which had been co-manufacturing flash memory with AMD since 1993. In December 2005, AMD divested itself of Spansion in order to focus on the microprocessor market, and Spansion went public in an IPO.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: On July 24, 2006, AMD announced its acquisition of the Canadian 3d graphics card company ATI Technologies. AMD paid $4.3 billion and 58 million shares of its stock, for a total of approximately $5.4 billion. The transaction was completed on October 25, 2006. On August 30, 2010, AMD announced that it would retire the ATI brand name for its graphics chipsets in favor of the AMD brand name.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: In October 2008, AMD announced plans to spin off manufacturing operations in the form of GlobalFoundries Inc., a multibillion-dollar joint venture with Advanced Technology Investment Co., an investment company formed by the government of Abu Dhabi. The partnership and spin-off gave AMD an infusion of cash and allowed it to focus solely on chip design. To assure the Abu Dhabi investors of the new venture's success, AMD's CEO Hector Ruiz stepped down in July 2008, while remaining executive chairman, in preparation for becoming chairman of GlobalFoundries in March 2009. President and COO Dirk Meyer became AMD's CEO. Recessionary losses necessitated AMD cutting 1,100 jobs in 2009.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: In August 2011, AMD announced that former Lenovo executive Rory Read would be joining the company as CEO, replacing Meyer. In November 2011, AMD announced plans to lay off more than 10% (1,400) of its employees from across all divisions worldwide. In October 2012, it announced plans to lay off an additional 15% of its workforce to reduce costs in the face of declining sales revenue.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: AMD acquired the low-power server manufacturer SeaMicro in early 2012, with an eye to bringing out an Arm64 server chip.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: On October 8, 2014, AMD announced that Rory Read had stepped down after three years as president and chief executive officer. He was succeeded by Lisa Su, a key lieutenant who had been serving as chief operating officer since June.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: On October 16, 2014, AMD announced a new restructuring plan along with its Q3 results. Effective July 1, 2014, AMD reorganized into two business groups: Computing and Graphics, which primarily includes desktop and notebook processors and chipsets, discrete GPUs, and professional graphics; and Enterprise, Embedded, and Semi-Custom, which primarily includes server and embedded processors, dense servers, semi-custom SoC products (including solutions for gaming consoles), engineering services, and royalties. As part of this restructuring, AMD announced that 7% of its global workforce would be laid off by the end of 2014.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: After the GlobalFoundries spin-off and subsequent layoffs, AMD was left with significant vacant space at 1 AMD Place, its aging Sunnyvale headquarters office complex. In August 2016, AMD's 47 years in Sunnyvale came to a close when it signed a lease with the Irvine Company for a new 220,000 sq. ft. headquarters building in Santa Clara. AMD's new location at Santa Clara Square faces the headquarters of archrival Intel across the Bayshore Freeway and San Tomas Aquino Creek. Around the same time, AMD also agreed to sell 1 AMD Place to the Irvine Company. In April 2019, the Irvine Company secured approval from the Sunnyvale City Council of its plans to demolish 1 AMD Place and redevelop the entire 32-acre site into townhomes and apartments.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: In October 2020, AMD announced that it was acquiring Xilinx in an all-stock transaction. The acquisition was completed in February 2022, with an estimated acquisition price of $50 billion.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: In February 1982, AMD signed a contract with Intel, becoming a licensed second-source manufacturer of 8086 and 8088 processors. IBM wanted to use the Intel 8088 in its IBM PC, but its policy at the time was to require at least two sources for its chips. AMD later produced the Am286 under the same arrangement. In 1984, Intel internally decided to no longer cooperate with AMD in supplying product information in order to shore up its advantage in the marketplace, and delayed and eventually refused to convey the technical details of the Intel 80386. In 1987, AMD invoked arbitration over the issue, and Intel reacted by canceling the 1982 technological-exchange agreement altogether. After three years of testimony, AMD eventually won in arbitration in 1992, but Intel disputed this decision. Another long legal dispute followed, ending in 1994 when the Supreme Court of California sided with the arbitrator and AMD.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: In 1990, Intel countersued AMD, renegotiating AMD's right to use derivatives of Intel's microcode for its cloned processors. In the face of uncertainty during the legal dispute, AMD was forced to develop clean room designed versions of Intel code for its x386 and x486 processors, the former long after Intel had released its own x386 in 1985. In March 1991, AMD released the Am386, its clone of the Intel 386 processor. By October of the same year it had sold one million units.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: In 1993, AMD introduced the first of the Am486 family of processors, which proved popular with a large number of original equipment manufacturers, including Compaq, which signed an exclusive agreement using the Am486. The Am5x86, another Am486-based processor, was released in November 1995, and continued AMD's success as a fast, cost-effective processor.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: Finally, in an agreement effective 1996, AMD received the rights to the microcode in Intel's x386 and x486 processor families, but not the rights to the microcode in the following generations of processors.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: AMD's first in-house x86 processor was the K5, launched in 1996. The "K" in its name was a reference to Kryptonite, the only substance known to harm comic book character Superman. This itself was a reference to Intel's hegemony over the market, i.e., an anthropomorphization of them as Superman. The number "5" was a reference to the fifth generation of x86 processors; rival Intel had previously introduced its line of fifth-generation x86 processors as Pentium because the U.S. Trademark and Patent Office had ruled that mere numbers could not be trademarked.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: In 1996, AMD purchased NexGen, specifically for the rights to their Nx series of x86-compatible processors. AMD gave the NexGen design team their own building, left them alone, and gave them time and money to rework the Nx686. The result was the K6 processor, introduced in 1997. Although it was based on Socket 7, variants such as K6-3/450 were faster than Intel's Pentium II (sixth-generation processor).


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: The K7 was AMD's seventh-generation x86 processor, making its debut under the brand name Athlon on June 23, 1999. Unlike previous AMD processors, it could not be used on the same motherboards as Intel's, due to licensing issues surrounding Intel's Slot 1 connector, and instead used a Slot A connector, referenced to the Alpha processor bus. The Duron was a lower-cost and limited version of the Athlon (64KB instead of 256KB L2 cache) in a 462-pin socketed PGA (socket A) or soldered directly onto the motherboard. Sempron was released as a lower-cost Athlon XP, replacing Duron in the socket A PGA era. It has since been migrated upward to all new sockets, up to AM3.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: On October 9, 2001, the Athlon XP was released. On February 10, 2003, the Athlon XP with 512KB L2 Cache was released.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: The K8 was a major revision of the K7 architecture, with the most notable features being the addition of a 64-bit extension to the x86 instruction set (called x86-64, AMD64, or x64), the incorporation of an on-chip memory controller, and the implementation of an extremely high-performance point-to-point interconnect called HyperTransport, as part of the Direct Connect Architecture. The technology was initially launched as the Opteron server-oriented processor on April 22, 2003. Shortly thereafter, it was incorporated into a product for desktop PCs, branded Athlon 64.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: On April 21, 2005, AMD released the first dual-core Opteron, an x86-based server CPU. A month later, it released the Athlon 64 X2, the first desktop-based dual-core processor family. In May 2007, AMD abandoned the string "64" in its dual-core desktop product branding, becoming Athlon X2, downplaying the significance of 64-bit computing in its processors. Further updates involved improvements to the microarchitecture, and a shift of the target market from mainstream desktop systems to value dual-core desktop systems. In 2008, AMD started to release dual-core Sempron processors exclusively in China, branded as the Sempron 2000 series, with lower HyperTransport speed and smaller L2 cache. AMD completed its dual-core product portfolio for each market segment.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: In September 2007, AMD released the first server Opteron K10 processors, followed in November by the Phenom processor for desktop. K10 processors came in dual-core, triple-core, and quad-core versions, with all cores on a single die. AMD released a new platform codenamed "Spider", which utilized the new Phenom processor, as well as an R770 GPU and a 790 GX/FX chipset from the AMD 700 chipset series. However, AMD built the Spider at 65nm, which was uncompetitive with Intel's smaller and more power-efficient 45nm.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: In January 2009, AMD released a new processor line dubbed Phenom II, a refresh of the original Phenom built using the 45 nm process. AMD's new platform, codenamed "Dragon", utilized the new Phenom II processor, and an ATI R770 GPU from the R700 GPU family, as well as a 790 GX/FX chipset from the AMD 700 chipset series. The Phenom II came in dual-core, triple-core and quad-core variants, all using the same die, with cores disabled for the triple-core and dual-core versions. The Phenom II resolved issues that the original Phenom had, including a low clock speed, a small L3 cache, and a Cool'n'Quiet bug that decreased performance. The Phenom II cost less but was not performance-competitive with Intel's mid-to-high-range Core 2 Quads. The Phenom II also enhanced its predecessor's memory controller, allowing it to use DDR3 in a new native socket AM3, while maintaining backward compatibility with AM2+, the socket used for the Phenom, and allowing the use of the DDR2 memory that was used with the platform.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: In April 2010, AMD released a new Phenom II Hexa-core (6-core) processor codenamed "Thuban". This was a totally new die based on the hexa-core "Istanbul" Opteron processor. It included AMD's "turbo core" technology, which allows the processor to automatically switch from 6 cores to 3 faster cores when more pure speed is needed.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: The Magny Cours and Lisbon server parts were released in 2010. The Magny Cours part came in 8 to 12 cores and the Lisbon part in 4 and 6 core parts. Magny Cours is focused on performance while the Lisbon part is focused on high performance per watt. Magny Cours is an MCM (multi-chip module) with two hexa-core "Istanbul" Opteron parts. This will use a new G34 socket for dual and quad-socket processors and thus will be marketed as Opteron 61xx series processors. Lisbon uses C32 socket certified for dual-socket use or single socket use only and thus will be marketed as Opteron 41xx processors. Both will be built on a 45 nm SOI process.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: Following AMD's 2006 acquisition of Canadian graphics company ATI Technologies, an initiative codenamed "Fusion" was announced to integrate a CPU and GPU together on some of AMD's microprocessors, including a built in PCI Express link to accommodate separate PCI Express peripherals, eliminating the northbridge chip from the motherboard. The initiative intended to move some of the processing originally done on the CPU (e.g. floating-point unit operations) to the GPU, which is better optimized for some calculations. The Fusion was later renamed the AMD APU (Accelerated Processing Unit).


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: Llano was AMD's first APU built for laptops. Llano was the second APU released, targeted at the mainstream market. It incorporated a CPU and GPU on the same die, as well as northbridge functions, and used "Socket FM1" with DDR3 memory. The CPU part of the processor was based on the Phenom II "Deneb" processor. AMD suffered an unexpected decrease in revenue based on production problems for the Llano. More AMD APUs for laptops running Windows 7 and Windows 8 OS are being used commonly. These include AMD's price-point APUs, the E1 and E2, and their mainstream competitors with Intel's core i-series: The Vision A- series, the A standing for accelerated. These range from the lower-performance A4 chipset to the A6, A8, and A10. These all incorporate Next-generation Radeon graphics cards, with the A4 utilizing the base Radeon HD chip and the rest using a Radeon R4 graphics card, with the exception of the highest-model A10 (A10-7300) which uses an R6 graphics card.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: Bulldozer was AMD's microarchitecture codename for server and desktop AMD FX processors, first released on October 12, 2011. This family 15h microarchitecture is the successor to the family 10h (K10) microarchitecture design. Bulldozer was a clean-sheet design, not a development of earlier processors. The core was specifically aimed at 10–125 W TDP computing products. AMD claimed dramatic performance-per-watt efficiency improvements in high-performance computing (HPC) applications with Bulldozer cores. While hopes were high that Bulldozer would bring AMD to be performance-competitive with Intel once more, most benchmarks were disappointing. In some cases the new Bulldozer products were slower than the K10 models they were built to replace.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: The Piledriver microarchitecture was the 2012 successor to Bulldozer, increasing clock speeds and performance relative to its predecessor. Piledriver would be released in AMD FX, APU, and Opteron product lines. Piledriver was subsequently followed by the Steamroller microarchitecture in 2013. Used exclusively in AMD's APUs, Steamroller focused on greater parallelism.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: In 2015, the Excavator microarchitecture replaced Piledriver. Expected to be the last microarchitecture of the Bulldozer series, Excavator focused on improved power efficiency.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: The Bobcat microarchitecture was revealed during a speech from AMD executive vice-president Henri Richard in Computex 2007 and was put into production during the first quarter of 2011. Based on the difficulty competing in the x86 market with a single core optimized for the 10–100 W range, AMD had developed a simpler core with a target range of 1–10 watts. In addition, it was believed that the core could migrate into the hand-held space if the power consumption can be reduced to less than 1 W.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: Jaguar is a microarchitecture codename for Bobcat's successor, released in 2013, that is used in various APUs from AMD aimed at the low-power/low-cost market. Jaguar and its derivates would go on to be used in the custom APUs of the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 4 Pro, Xbox One S, and Xbox One X. Jaguar would be later followed by the Puma microarchitecture in 2014.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: In 2012, AMD announced it was working on Arm products, both as a semi-custom product and server product. The initial server product was announced as the Opteron A1100 in 2014, and 8-core Cortex-A57 based ARMv8-A SoC, and was expected to be followed by an APU incorporating a Graphic Core Next GPU. However, the Opteron A1100 was not released until 2016, with the delay attributed to adding software support. The A1100 was also criticized for not having support from major vendors upon its release.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: In 2014, AMD also announced the K12 custom core for release in 2016. While being ARMv8-A instruction set architecture compliant, the K12 is expected to be entirely custom designed targeting server, embedded, and semi-custom markets. While ARM architecture development continued, products based on K12 were subsequently delayed with no release planned, in preference to the development of AMD's x86-based Zen microarchitecture.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: Zen is a new architecture for x86-64 based Ryzen series CPUs and APUs, introduced in 2017 by AMD and built from the ground up by a team led by Jim Keller, beginning with his arrival in 2012, and taping out before his departure in September 2015. One of AMD's primary goals with Zen was an IPC increase of at least 40%, however in February 2017 AMD announced that they had actually achieved a 52% increase. Processors made on the Zen architecture are built on the 14 nm FinFET node and have a renewed focus on single-core performance and HSA compatibility. Previous processors from AMD were either built in the 32 nm process ("Bulldozer" and "Piledriver" CPUs) or the 28 nm process ("Steamroller" and "Excavator" APUs). Because of this, Zen is much more energy efficient. The Zen architecture is the first to encompass CPUs and APUs from AMD built for a single socket (Socket AM4). Also new for this architecture is the implementation of simultaneous multithreading (SMT) technology, something Intel has had for years on some of their processors with their proprietary Hyper-Threading implementation of SMT. This is a departure from the "Clustered MultiThreading" design introduced with the Bulldozer architecture. Zen also has support for DDR4 memory. AMD released the Zen-based high-end Ryzen 7 "Summit Ridge" series CPUs on March 2, 2017, mid-range Ryzen 5 series CPUs on April 11, 2017, and entry level Ryzen 3 series CPUs on July 27, 2017. AMD later released the Epyc line of Zen derived server processors for 1P and 2P systems. In October 2017, AMD released Zen-based APUs as Ryzen Mobile, incorporating Vega graphics cores. In January 2018 AMD has announced their new lineup plans, with Ryzen 2. AMD launched CPUs with the 12nm Zen+ microarchitecture in April 2018, following up with the 7nm Zen 2 microarchitecture in June 2019, including an update to the Epyc line with new processors using the Zen 2 microarchitecture in August 2019, and Zen 3 slated for release in Q3 2020. As of 2019, AMD's Ryzen processors were reported to outsell Intel's consumer desktop processors. At CES 2020 AMD announced their Ryzen Mobile 4000, as the first 7 nm x86 mobile processor, the first 7 nm 8-core (also 16-thread) high-performance mobile processor, and the first 8-core (also 16-thread) processor for ultrathin laptops. This generation is still based on the Zen 2 architecture. In October 2020 AMD announced their Zen 3 CPU. On PassMark's Single thread performance test the Ryzen 5 5600x bested all other CPUs besides the Ryzen 9 5950X.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: The Steam Deck, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Series S all use chips based on the Zen 2 microarchitecture, with proprietary tweaks and different configurations in each system's implementation than AMD sells in its own commercially available APUs.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: In 2008, the ATI division of AMD released the TeraScale microarchitecture implementing a unified shader model. This design replaced the previous fixed-function hardware of previous graphics cards with multipurpose, programmable shaders. Initially released as part of the GPU for the Xbox 360, this technology would go on to be used in Radeon branded HD 2000 parts. Three generations of TeraScale would be designed and used in parts from 2008 to 2014.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: In a 2009 restructuring, AMD merged the CPU and GPU divisions to support the company's APUs, which fused both graphics and general purpose processing. In 2011, AMD released the successor to TeraScale, Graphics Core Next (GCN). This new microarchitecture emphasized GPGPU compute capability in addition to graphics processing, with a particular aim of supporting heterogeneous computing on AMD's APUs. GCN's reduced instruction set ISA allowed for significantly increased compute capability over TeraScale's very long instruction word ISA. Since GCN's introduction with the HD 7970, five generations of the GCN architecture have been produced from 2008 through at least 2017.


title: Advanced Micro Devices

text: In September 2015, AMD separated the graphics technology division of the company into an independent internal unit called the Radeon Technologies Group (RTG) headed by Raja Koduri. This gave the graphics division of AMD autonomy in product design and marketing. The RTG then went on to create and release the Polaris and Vega microarchitectures released in 2016 and 2017, respectively. In particular the Vega, or 5th generation GCN, microarchitecture includes a number of major revisions to improve performance and compute capabilities.