How does your company continue to remain innovative?
We are continually innovating at AMD. In the 24 months we have announced Mantle and FreeSyncand earlier in 2013 we announced Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA).
Mantle is our low-level rendering API for games which helps developers to bring great games to the PC faster. To date, we already have 99 developers working with Mantle including Cloud Imperium Games, DICE, Firaxis and Rebellion. In its first year, we hope to see more games that support Mantle, and with nearly 100 developers currently signed up to our BETA program that is a testimony to just how much of an impact Mantle has had on the developer community.
FreeSync will leverage existing industry standards, like DisplayPort Adaptive-sync, to deliver dynamic refresh rates to reduce input latency and reduce or fully eliminate tearing during gaming and video playback. Whilst one of our competitors is producing a similar screen-tear-eliminating solutions, what sets us apart is that FreeSync will be royalty free and using an open standard. That means that the vendors of the screens will not have to pay any additional fees for licensing and that saving could be passed on to consumers.
By harnessing the processing power of the AMD APU, which combines the GPU and CPU elements onto a single chip, HSA delivers new levels of performance that will tackle parallel compute-intensive processing tasks far more efficiently than the CPU alone.
At AMD we never settle for anything less than providing our audiences with an outstanding graphics experience. Through new product launches, such as the AMD RadeonR9 285 GPU, or through technology innovations like Mantle, FreeSync and HSA, we will continue to innovate and improve.
What does it take to be a market leader in the microprocessor space?
To be a market leader in the microprocessor business requires innovative thinking, great engineers and a customer-centric approach. Over the years AMD has proven to have all of these qualities, being a leading innovator with a series of worlds’ firsts in the industry such as our industry’s first native quad-core x86 system on chip (SoC) processor, our APU technology or most recently the world’s fastest graphics card the AMD Radeon R9 295X2. All those innovations have been brought to market to respond to our customers’ needs and end-user demand. Of course this is thanks to highly talented leaders and engineers such as our CTO Mark Papermaster and Jim Keller, chief architect of AMD’s microprocessor cores.
With Africa continuing to be the most buoyant region for technology sales at the moment, what sort of advantages does this give your company?
We’re seeing some very interesting trends in the market, with the increased penetration of mobile products over the last decade and considering your point, six of the 15 fastest growing economies in the world are in Africa. The potential for increased growth in the PC space is healthy and something we’re very excited about. More importantly though, at AMD we’re passionate about providing great technologies that have a real impact on the end experience. A key area for this is in education – putting the technology in the hands of the people who will become the future engineers, scientists and so on, to ensure they are getting the best experience possible is incredibly important to us.
What new advancements can we expect from your company soon?
As an innovative technology company, we’re continuously developing new products and striving to be on that cutting edge. AMD will continue its focus in delivering best in class graphics and computing solutions in the PC market while expanding its presence in adjacent markets like Embedded, Dense servers and Semi-customs.
What do you see as the next wave of technology trends on the continent?
I think 2015 is going to be a very interesting year. I’m excited to see what happens as the trend towards “consumerisation” of technology products continues and as smaller, lighter and thinner examples of notebooks come to fruition and to see the adoption rate of those across Africa. From a gaming standpoint, the emergence of “Steam box” type products and other small form factor gaming platforms that are now available with our APU technology. The development in smart watches and wearables is certainly very exciting from a technology point of view, it’ll be interesting to see how that unfolds.
What plans does AMD have in the short term for expansion on the continent?
Africa and the Middle East region represent an important market for AMD and we are currently examining our options as to how we can develop our market presence. The relationships we have with our distribution, multinational corporate partners and of course our resellers play a very important role in this and in telling the AMD story both now and in the future.
What recent milestones did your company celebrate?
Late last year, we celebrated 30 years of graphics and gaming innovation with the #AMD30Live event. Livestreamed on Twitch, more than 168,000 viewers were treated to interviews with game developers, but were also the first people to see the reveal of our new AMD RadeonR9 285 graphics card. The live reveal was a first for us, we wanted to give back directly to gamers by giving them the first look at this card. We saw incredible excitement and received great feedback from our audiences on a global scale, re-confirming to us that AMD is providing the right products at the right prices, with incredible performance grounded in strong technological innovation.
The Radeon R9 285 GPU comes loaded with the latest graphics core next (GCN) architecture features, mixed screen resolution Eyefinity technology, support for the upcoming DirectX 12 (to be released in 2015) as well as our own ground-breaking Mantle API. The Radeon R9 285 GPU is the next step in our strategy to ensure that we continue to deliver the best possible graphics and gaming experience.
PC gamers aren’t the only audience to utilise our graphics technology either. The latest generation of consoles including the Microsoft Xbox One, Nintendo Wii U, and Sony Playstation 4 all use AMD technology. There are even AMD-powered “Steam Machines”.
And of course, I’m proud to reiterate that our Radeon R9 295X2 is still the fastest graphics card in the world, and is a great example of the performance an AMD graphics card can offer.
