AMD opens new R&D centre in Hyderabad

Hyderabad: Semiconductor maker Advanced Micro Devices today announced the expansion of its R&D centre in Hyderabad and aims to focus on intellectual property creation in the areas of next generation consumer electronics, graphics capabilities and microprocessors.

The President and Chief Operating Officer of AMD, Mr Dirk Meyer, a veteran at AMD with his work on various processors including Athlon and Barcelona, inaugurated the centre in the presence of senior members of the company’s design team.

AMD added Hyderabad centre to its research portfolio after the acquisition of graphics design company ATI which has a R&D centre in Hyderabad. With this addition, the company expects to address issues of convergence of personal computers with other mobility devices.

Addressing newspersons after inaugurating the AMD centre here today, Mr Meyer said that this follows the company’s announcement late last year to expand the Bangalore development centre. Together the company has four R&D centres in India.

multimedia products

The R&D team here plays a strategic role on microprocessors, embedded systems software for consumer electronics and VLSI (very large scale integration) among other areas. The Hyderabad centre has designed multimedia products for consumer electronics companies, including mobile phones, game consoles, LCD panels and TV tuner cards.

While the company officials did not divulge any financial commitments or the number of human resources they plan to add, the President said AMD has recently given a guidance that during the third quarter of 2008, it would return to profitability backed by the launch of new range of processors.

New processors

Providing some insights into new processors, Mr Meyer said that the Phenom range of quad-core processors would become popular in desktops by the end of 2008, and the Fusion range that combines the power of central processing unit and graphics capability would be out in mid 2009. The processor design is undergoing a fundamental change from focus on packing more microprocessors to a situation where efforts are trained to bring down overall power consumption. The demand for higher power efficiencies is common to not just desktops but also to servers and in data centres, he said.

50/15 vision

On the 50/15 vision articulated by the company CEO, Dr Hector Ruiz, Mr Meyer said “it would be our effort to drive this vision where we want about 50 per cent of the world’ population to have PC power by 2015.”

Asked about SemIndia partnership, Mr Meyer said the company has announced its intent to provide technology support and offer necessary inputs.