AMD: Expansion, Growth and Doubling Down on AI Innovation

With the AI chips market valued at US$53.5bn in 2023, and set to grow to US$67bn in 2024, companies designing and manufacturing these chips have seen unprecedented growth in recent months.

One of the leading companies in this field is AMD, which in May 2024 celebrated its 55th anniversary. As the company marks over half a century of innovation, it is also looking ahead at the opportunities the new AI era presents.

AMD has recently announced an expansion of its mobile and desktop AI PC portfolio to better deliver business AI productivity and connectivity experiences, with its AI chips helping its shares soar in recent months.

This expansion has been spearheaded by Chair and CEO Dr Lisa Su, who has led the company’s transformation into a high-performance and adaptive computing leader and one of the fastest-growing semiconductor companies in the world.

And according to a blog published by AMD’s Chief Technology Officer, Mark Papermaster, the company will continue to establish itself for the decades to come.

“AI is the most exciting and significant technology disruption in a lifetime, and AMD is positioned to service our customers’ insatiable demand for more computing capacity with our leadership products and roadmap,” he said.

The rise of AMD: Growth and doubling down on innovation

AMD has undergone a dramatic transformation and expansion over the past five years in particular. The company has more than doubled its global engineering workforce to over 15,000 employees to help it deliver cutting-edge chips, software and enterprise AI solutions.

“Xilinx was the largest semiconductor acquisition when completed in 2022 adding incredible talent, leadership IP, and market expansion to adaptive compute markets with deep customer relationships,” Mark wrote.

Elsewhere, key acquisitions like Pensando, Mipsology and Nod.ai have also bolstered AMD’s capabilities in networking and AI software. The company’s R&D investment has nearly quadrupled since 2019 to US$5.9bn in 2023 as it doubled down on innovation.

Today, AMD's high-performance portfolio spans supercomputing, cloud, edge, embedded, and personal computing markets. “Our technologies underpin 30% of the world's servers and 140 of the Top500 supercomputers in the world, including eight of the top 10 most energy-efficient supercomputers,” he said.

A holistic approach for the AI era

As Mark explains, AMD will be taking a holistic approach looking forward. “We don't believe the next five years of advancement will be realised by a single company, product or vision. The future of technology will be born from open ecosystems and deep industry partnerships that drive true innovation.”

AMD, he says, is shifting away from siloed product development “to a modular IP portfolio with resulting products connected by a single AI software stack that will make deployment easy for developers and users.” This new “holistic design approach” optimises the entire stack to maintain rapid performance and efficiency gains.

“AI is transforming the way we create and deliver our products at AMD,” he wrote. “We have shifted from unique product silo development with its own software stacks to a modular IP portfolio with resulting products connected by a single AI software stack that will make deployment easy for developers and users. This is a solution-oriented approach that goes beyond our previous achievements. Our new approach must consider the optimization from silicon to software to the final applications, it is a holistic design approach.

“This inflection point is truly unprecedented and exciting. AI is poised to become more ubiquitous and consequential than the advent of the Internet. As AMD turns 55, I am excited to collaborate with world class AMD engineers, customers and industry partners who are guided by a data-centric culture of innovation to usher in the next era of adaptive and high-performance computing.”

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