AMD spills beans on what’s next, and there’s some big news on the way.
AMD has had, by any metrics, quite a good period of late, with the tech company, once referred to as Chipzilla, surpass its archrival Intel in terms of market capitalization.
At the time of writing, AMD is worth about a third more than its nemesis at just over $133 billion, and that’s despite a lukewarm, post-COVID hangover that saw other many hardware-first tech companies suffer from a perfect storm.
The cost of living crisis, disruption in global supply chains, rising tensions between China and the US and of course, the war between Russia and Ukraine means that fewer people are buying laptops and desktops and hyperscalers are increasingly lengthening the average lifecycle of their server parks. All this has a knock off effect on spending and revenue for AMD and Intel.
With that backdrop in mind, I spoke to Matthew Unangst, senior director for the company’s commercial client PC and workstation business unit to find out more about AMD’s plans for 2023 and beyond.
(Note that the interview was carried out at the end of January 2023 and things may have changed in the meantime.)
1. Matt, let’s start by finding out what’s your outlook for 2023 in terms of opportunities and headwinds?
Over the next several years we see one of our largest growth opportunities in AI, which is in the early stage of transforming virtually every industry, service and product. We expect AI adoption will accelerate significantly over the coming year and are incredibly excited about leveraging our broad portfolio of CPUs, GPUs, and adaptive accelerators, in combination with our software expertise, to deliver differentiated solution that can address the full spectrum of AI needs in training and inference across cloud, edge, and client. Our new Ryzen 7040 mobile processors represent the first integration of our AI technology into processors, and we are working with the entire ecosystem to enable and deliver new, exciting experiences!
2. Post-COVID, has AMD seen a resurgence of the business desktop PC market, or are business laptops the way to go in a hybrid world?
We have more than 250 ultrathin, gaming and commercial notebook design wins spanning our full family of Ryzen 7000 series processors on-track to launch this year, an increase of 25 percent year-over-year, with the first notebooks planned to go on-sale in February (ed: they’re already here).
