US chip design major Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) last month announced that it will invest $400 million in India for its largest 500,000 sq ft design centre that will come up in Bengaluru. In an exclusive interaction, Mark Papermaster, executive vice president (EVP) and chief technology officer (CTO) of AMD, talks to Jatin Grover about the importance of India for chip design, the upcoming design centre, plans on sourcing talent, product innovations, etc. Excerpts:
How important is India a market for AMD for chip design?
The India team plays a role in the design of nearly every AMD chip across our diversified portfolio in high-performance CPU, server, data centre GPU, gaming graphics, PC, adaptive computing and embedded devices. The team works collaboratively on all the chip designs with their counterparts spread across the globe.
How much fiscal support will the government provide for AMD’s upcoming design centre?
The announced $400-million investment from AMD is not tied to government incentives. The company is pursuing the project on its own.
When can we expect this new R&D centre to open?
The office will open in two phases. Approximately 1,000 employees will move to the office by this year-end and the remaining in 2024. We plan to increase our full-time employee base in India from over 6,500 today to 9,500 plus by 2028-end, bringing on-board 3,000 new engineers in the next five years.
Any specific areas in which you are looking to take up R&D and design in India?
As we bring AI processing capabilities broadly across AMD products, India teams will help us advance AI and machine learning hardware and software product development.
Do you think getting the right talent in the semiconductor space will be challenging?
India has huge potential to meet the talent demand of the semiconductor industry. More than half-a-million engineers graduate each year, so there is the availability of raw talent. The gap is not in the headcount but in the skill set. Currently, skill development happens after engineers graduate and join companies. To address this gap, the government of India set up a talent committee that was spearheaded by Jaya Jagadish, AMD country head. The committee proposed curriculum changes and AICTE (All India Council for Technical Education) is already making them in 300-plus engineering colleges that offer a major in VLSI design. These measures along with other initiatives will not only make India self-reliant in semiconductor talent but also enable the country to meet the talent needs of the industry, globally.
How is AMD looking to source the talent for its design centre?
As we bring AI processing capabilities broadly across AMD products, the skill of our India teams is important in advancing AI and machine learning hardware and software product development. In addition to hiring laterally and from engineering colleges across metros, Tier 2 and 3 cities, we will focus on creating an internal talent pool of young engineers who can grow and lead teams. To address the skill gap, we have been successfully running a co-op program at AMD since 2011 wherein we have signed MOUs with select accredited universities in Hyderabad and Bengaluru, who offer courses in VLSI and related fields. This programme is only open to MTech students, who, if selected, spend nine months of their final year at AMD to work on real world projects such as next generation CPU and GPU technologies. On an average, 90% co-ops get converted as full time employees. Further, AMD works with many regional and national level engineering colleges to help build a new age curriculum that is industry aligned.
How feasible it would be for the company to develop an end-to-end ecosystem of design and manufacturing chips in India?
We welcome the government’s initiative to bring semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem to India. However, AMD being fabless is not looking to set up manufacturing facilities in India. We had our own fabs for many years but in 2009, we made the decision to go fabless. Since then, we have partnered with multiple foundries for chip manufacturing, including TSMC, GlobalFoundries and Samsung.
How are you collaborating with Indian startups and developers, and helping them fostering innovation and providing accessible solutions?
At AMD, we deeply collaborate across the computing ecosystem with open-source solutions to accelerate both performance and energy efficiency in chips. While this is a journey, we have made great progress in building a powerful open software stack called, AMD ROCm. It is a complete set of libraries, runtime compilers, drivers, tools like our debugger and profiler, etc. ROCm, in its fifth generation, supports the AI software ecosystem, including open frameworks, models and tools. We have also collaborated with PyTorch Foundation to enable seamless utilisation of AMD GPUs for artificial intelligence (AI). In addition to our developer support tools, the AMD Research division makes many contributions to give programmers the tools required to extract the maximum performance from today’s complex computer architectures.
How are you working to balance energy efficiency and performance aspects in the company’s product offerings?
Maximising the computing performance delivered per watt of energy consumed is a vital aspect of our business strategy, and it has been for some time. Our products; cutting-edge chip architecture, as well as design and power management features have resulted in significant energy efficiency gains. We achieved a 31.7x increase in performance per watt for processors in mobile devices, exceeding the AMD 25×20 Energy Efficiency goal and we haven’t slowed down. We are on track to achieve a 40x increase in performance per watt for processors in mobile devices by the end of 2023. Today, AMD Ryzen processors continue to help deliver energy-efficient laptops without compromise, including our Ryzen 5800U processors with up to 43% better power efficiency than Energy Star 8.0 requirements.