Chip maker Advanced Micro Devices is seeing a resurgence in the semiconductor market and India is playing a major role in its turnaround.

“India has become the number one market for AMD in the commercial PC segment,” said Mark Papermaster, chief technology officer of AMD told ET in an interview. “This is because of a combination of two things: winning government tenders and working with large corporations in India.”

AMD is targeting the commercial PC market with its Ryzen Pro chipsets where customers can buy commercial PCs from vendors such as HP, Dell and Lenovo.

Papermaster said that the company has been successful in government tenders in India.

While vendors like Dell or HP bid for government projects, AMD offers solutions for the compute power they get with the PC and helps manage their IT facility.

Analysts say that AMD has a historical record of focusing on government business.

“We can’t see them reporting the types of wins they are gaining. Historically however, they have focussed on winning government deals and working with vendors bidding on government contracts,” said Alan Priestley, Research Director at Gartner in the Semiconductors and Electronics Research team.

Globally, government contracts have stringent specifications in which AMD has done well. “Some of them used to be price sensitive, maybe that gave them advantage over the pricing that Intel had,” said Priestley, adding that AMD does not make that information public.

AMD’s battle with chip giant Intel in the data centre and PC business has not seen much success in the past decade. The smaller rival suffered design challenges in its chips and a flux in its leadership, as Intel rose in dom ..

But the status quo of Intel's dominance is changing says Papermaster.

“We have gone from almost no share in servers, and our goal is to exit with 5% share (by the end of the year) and then to grow to double digit share going forward,” said Papermaster. “We are going to win share by providing total cost of ownership advantage to those running data centers (cloud players).”

AMD launched its EPYC server chips for datacenters in 2017 that is now used in the public data centers of Tencent, Microsoft Azure, and Baidu. Cloud providers want to offer more compute to customers per dollar, per watt of energy, and that’s what we do with EPYC, said Papermaster.

The company has also renewed focus on semiconductor technologies used for artificial intelligence and machine learning where it competes with Nvidia, whose gaming chips are being used for training algorithms. ..

AMD and Nvidia are pitching their GPU technology to major cloud players who are developing AI programs and applications. Most of the cloud players have huge amounts of data that they have to analyse.

“We are on growth mode: we are taking share in PCs, we are re-entering data centers and are historically strong with graphics in gaming, now we have added graphics compute with ML. We are gaining share in traditional markets and entering new markets in data center and ML,” said Papermaster. ..

In this regard, the company is ramping up resources in India and has opened a new 270 people Satellite office in Bangalore. In addition, they have expanded their Hyderabad facility to accommodate 160 employees. AMD has over 1200 full time employees in India.

By: DocMemory
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