In an interview with India’s Economic Times, Sunnyvale, California-based semiconductor company AMD‘s chief technology officer Mark Papermaster discussed the contribution of the company’s R&D facilities in India. These R&D centers are located in Hyderabad and Bangalore, housing over 1,000 of its 6,000-strong global tech team.
Excerpts of the interview:
Papermaster: India is a key element of our development team and every aspect of product development. The AMD strategy is focused on three pillars: gaming and immersive apps, which is Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, compute – which is data centers, high-performance computing and high performance graphics – and semi-custom solutions, where we work with partners on products like the Xbox 1or PS4. The India design center does a lot of key software and IP development with gaming and graphics, chip design and software as well as to create tailored solutions.
Papermaster: Just like in consumer goods, there are tech cycles. Every 12-18 months, we will see new product revisions … it could be better screens or a wireless headset. As it becomes more affordable, more content is likely to be created and apps will take off. All it takes is one killer app for something to become popular.
Papermaster: There are a couple of areas that we expect to be high growth. One is compute: AMD products are very well suited for machine learning applications as they need CPU and GPU. Immersive computing is another area. It’s a nascent industry and will see significant growth for AMD to develop and support products.
