On the sidelines of the AMD Technology Showcase 2014, Raja Koduri, Corporate Vice President – AMD Visual Computing, spoke to Pankaj Maru about company’s new product line for Indian market, and shared insight on how AMD is looking at the enterprise segment for growth.
Excerpts…
What are the key challenges that AMD faces in the modern business environment?
The big challenge we, and rest of the industry, face is related to the fact that the consumer demand for mobiles is very high. Everybody wants to carry a more powerful device, one that can offer rich visual experiences. To develop a technology that fits within the small form factor, we have to evolve systems that are more power efficient. That is where the challenge is. That is what we are doing. We are developing new architectures that are very power efficient.
On the other hand we have things like virtual reality, which requires graphics to be even more real. Just like the world that we are looking at right now. You want the world to look that real in your computers. And that requires tremendous processing power – lots of performance, its like having a rendering farm in your hand. So both of these are driving – high energy efficiency and high rendering performance needs.
For past 30 years, AMD has been dominating the consumer segment with a range of graphic and processor products, but the company has not made any major move into the enterprise segment. What is your view of enterprise space?
Enterprise is definitely a huge growth opportunity for AMD. We have lot of opportunities to grow in this area. In fact, we are now beginning to focus on growing on enterprise segment. One of things that we are focusing on is virtualisation and even graphics virtualisation and GPU virtualisation, which is huge in the enterprise. We are the first company to have hardware architecture for virtualisation. We demonstrated that at VM World – the VMware conference – and got a lot of traction there. We have a good partnership with VMware and few others. I expect significant growth in AMD’s enterprise business over next the 12 months.
What kind of growth are you hoping to have in your enterprise business?
Currently much of our business is on the consumer side, a small percentage is on the enterprise side. However, we would like to grow our enterprise business to the same level as our consumer business. This will be a huge growth for us.
Can you throw some light on the technologies that you already have in the market?
We have lot presence in data centres, gaming PCs and we are increasing our presence in enterprise desktop PCs and notebook computers. These are the areas where we are seeing a fair amount of traction. In the area of gaming we are a force to reckon with as we are in the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, two of the bestselling gaming systems of the world.
Do you expect cloud gaming to catch up in India?
I expect cloud gaming to grow rapidly in India. Currently many areas in India face issues related to connectivity, but with better technology things will improve.
What can industry expect from AMD over the next year or so?
We have a great pipeline of enterprise products that are in the works. As of now, we are not ready to make a public announcement regarding the enterprise portfolio that we are creating, but in the next 6 to 12 months, you will get to know.
AMD has announced its new FirePro graphics cards for the Indian market. Where does this product-line fit in the market in terms of usage?
From my stand point, I am super excited about getting FirePro graphics cards into the hands of the content creation folks in India. These cards will be appreciated by the studios, on both the entertainment side and also on the CAD side. There is lots of work going on in India and there is a lot of creative talent here. Being able to help them is super exciting.
pankaj.maru @expressindia.com
