The Hindu : Business : AMD chief hails leading role of Indian researchers

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Friday, Nov 30, 2007
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AMD chief hails leading role of Indian researchers

Anand Parthasarathy

Third lab located in Bangalore
1,000 engineers work in three centres

— PHOTO: G. R. N. SOMASHEKAR

EXTENDING REACH: Hector Ruiz (left), Chairman and CEO, AMD Far East, with Clyde Rudriuez, chief staff to Hector, at a press conference in Bangalore on Thursday.

BANGALORE: Key contributions in the recent creation of the world’s first true quad processor — a chip with four separate number-crunching cores — came from India-based engineers of AMD, the U.S.-based semiconductor leader’s Chief Executive Hector Ruiz, said here on Thursday.

He was inaugurating the AMD’s latest global development facility — the third in India — which would enable it to add another 350 engineers, bringing its total research strength in this country (with existing centres in Bangalore and Hyderabad) to almost a thousand.

This would enable AMD to extend its reach from the desktop to a gamut of new portable platforms from hand-held computers to mobile phones, Dr. Ruiz added.

India-based researchers are also playing a leading role in ensuring the roll out in 2008 of ‘Shanghai’, AMD’s code name for its first quad processor in the denser 45 nanometer process.

The company has also partnered with SemIndia, the first entity to announce silicon chip fabrication in India to provide knowhow and technology. “While progress in setting up the ‘fab’ is a little slower than we had anticipated, we still value such partnerships with players who understand the local environment,” Dr. Ruiz said. Admitting that a manufacturing facility close to R&D centres made sense, he discounted any immediate plans for AMD to set up its own fabs in the near future.

In his inaugural remarks, Karnataka’s IT Secretary M. N. Vidyashankar said Bangalore accounted for almost 70 per cent of all chip design work — but fellow bureaucrat, Chief Secretary P. B. Mahishi jokingly pointed to its infrastructural challenges: a recent survey had found that the average vehicular speed in the city was just 13 kilometres per hour, he said.

In a separate function AMD’s Director, Government Affairs, Susan Moore, joined Lata Krishnan, President of American India Foundation, an international voluntary organisation focussed on socio-economic change in India, to inaugurate a ‘learning lab’ at the Government High School, Doddanakundi. The lab equipped with AMD-chip fuelled PCs will provide Net access to over 200 children and is part of the chip maker’s 50x15 initiative to connect 50 percent of the world’s people to Internet by 2015.

In a briefing for The Hindu on Thursday, Dr. Ruiz revealed that AMD planned in 2008 to launch chips where one or two of the four processing cores in a quad chip, would be GPs or graphic processors, concentrating on the graphic and video applications running on a machine. “Think of it this way: when you play a movie on your laptop, the battery normally runs out before the film does. But with one of these new heterogenous core chips, the main processing cores would go to sleep leaving only the GPs to run the movie — with a big saving in power consumption. You can see the full movie without having to recharge the batteries.”

India-based engineers of AMD were ‘right in the middle’ of such upcoming technology breakthroughs, Dr. Ruiz said, Their expertise was particularly strong in the area of graphics for hand held devices. Not generally known was AMD’s quiet presence in the mobile phone graphics arena: having provided the technology that fuels some high end LG phones and other smart phones. What will challenge chip designers tomorrow — in India and elsewhere? Dr. Ruiz has no doubts: “Creating energy efficient platforms... even while providing customers the ultimate visual experience.”

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