Can you tell us a few words about your company?
AMD is an American company that has been innovating in the field of High Technology and High Performance Computing for more than fifty years, particularly for graphics and display. The company is renowned for its expertise and large portfolio of products around CPUs and GPUs, used by millions of people through their PC, tablet, or game console.
To increase this portfolio of solutions, last February AMD acquired Xilinx, which is today a leader in FPGAs (Field-programmable gate array). Specifically, this allows the company to address a much more complete market, responding to the new demands of the players present in this market.
Since this acquisition, the Xilinx company has been integrated into the AECG (Adaptive and Embedded Computing Group) division which is now led by Victor Peng, former CEO of Xilinx. This acquisition allows AMD to have an additional 5,000 employees, for a total of 15,000 employees within the group.
Can you tell us more about your experience and the technologies developed within your company, and in particular FPGAs?
Solutions offered by AMD span the entire telecommunications chain, from the core network to the end user. Our objective is then to offer solutions adapted to each client, according to the different types of treatment to be carried out.
As for the FPGA, a term that can be translated into French as “field programmable gate network”, it suits different use cases and different uses. It is programmed directly by the end user according to his precise needs and targets many markets, such as data centers, telecommunications, but also automotive, test and measurement, the medical and scientific industry, or even the military and aerospace industry. The added value of the FPGA therefore resides in the fact that it can be adapted to numerous specific tasks, by being able to process new algorithms that come onto the market very efficiently and in real time. This largely explains the fact that this technology is becoming more and more successful today!
What are the challenges your company faces today?
AMD’s mission is to meet the needs of its customers in terms of “computing,” particularly in terms of high performance computing and what is called “embedded and adaptive computing.” AMD’s acquisition of Xilinx therefore enables it to provide an additional solution to all of its customers, so that its solutions can run more efficiently, with lower power consumption and lower cost.
Is the objective, therefore, to adapt to the evolution of different technologies by offering your customers fully adapted solutions?
In fact, in recent years, CPUs alone are no longer necessarily capable of providing all the solutions. Now it’s about delivering heterogeneous processing from one CPU and one accelerator. It is precisely on this that AMD concentrates all its offers.
To date, more than 80% of the data transmitted on the Internet is video. It’s more and more about recording content and streaming it in real time, especially with the rise of live streaming platforms like Twitch. The challenge for their platforms then lies in being able to distribute live videos to thousands of users, adapting the video transcoding according to the tool used by each Internet user (smartphone, computer, console, etc.). It’s a big challenge for the core network, which will have to process all these flows! Our solutions precisely enable transcoding in real time, from a server and an FPGA-based accelerator.
On the other hand, we are investing massively in Smart Network Solutions (SmartNICs) that will cover a critical need in the field of cybersecurity, but also in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
What are your development projects for the coming months and years?
Precisely, the field of artificial intelligence will be found in all markets horizontally; One of the biggest challenges for AMD in the next five years will be to develop solutions that can process this massive stream of data at the AI level. Our advantage is the fact that the three main bricks, which are the CPU, the GPU or the FPGA, will be able to provide concrete solutions!
Thanks to our product portfolio, we can now offer an answer to all these new challenges. AI is a market segment that we focus very specifically on, and in which we invest a lot of resources in terms of Research and Development, to find new solutions that meet the needs of all our customers.
This content was produced with SCRIBEO. The BFMBUSINESS editorial team was not involved in the production of this content.
Source: BFM TV
