AMD India embarks on product expansion

Plans to hire about 250-300 engineers in India

AMD India has embarked on expansion of its product and software development as well as increasing its headcount in the country.

“The company started major expansion in 2008 by taking ownership of complete pieces in a product life cycle. Today, we have hardware engineers as well as software engineers in our R&D centres located in both Bengaluru and Hyderabad,” said AMD India Corporate VP and COO Kiranmai Pendyala. The company has regional sales offices in Gurugram and Mumbai. AMD further expanded its presence after acquiring ATI Technologies Inc in 2006 and has currently 1,300 plus employees.

On India hiring strategy, Kiranmai said on an average every year the company hires close to about 250-300 engineers in India. “We will hire about the same numbers in 2018. This is a substantial number when you are talking about the microprocessor industry. It is a niche space and we need specialised engineers,” she said. When asked about the contribution from India, AMD India Corporate VP, Design Engineering Jaya Jagadish said there is a stamp of the Indian team on each one of AMD’s product pipeline.

“We have something called SoC (System on Chip) which is really a set of IPs put together that allow our chips to talk to other parts of a computer system. Most of the SoC design happens in India and makes significant contribution to our designs, on the silicon side,” she said.

On the software piece, Jaya said the company has a really good software team which works on optimizing their compilers and drivers. "We are the only company that makes both CPUs and GPUs. Our graphics team powers next generation immersive technologies via hardware and software,”she said.

The Software Workstation Group based out of Hyderabad works to optimize the system performance of AMD hardware. The Radeon Software Technologies (RTG) software group (graphics-focused business unit under AMD) pushes the limits of AMDs graphics offerings, even location-based VR in India.

When asked about the Ryzen Mobile processors and the wireless chip acquisition, Jaya said India centre contributed to develop the SoC as well as the main ‘Zen’ core.

"We collaborated with our colleagues in the US and other parts to build the Zen core, while the Ryzen SoC design was done out of India. The software team made significant contributions by building the driver and compilers like the Ryzen Master," she said.

She further added that in terms of the wireless chips it is a new group that has been integrated into AMD after the acquisition of Nitero.

On engagement with academia, Kiranmai said AMD has the ‘3R’ strategy which includes research, relationship and recruitment.

Besides research and relationship with academia like IITs and IISc, AMD is also involved in a recruitment programme called Co-op which enrolls final year students who are pursuing MTech or MS in electrical and electronic telecommunication engineering.