Tech-Developments to Transform Our Digital World in 2018

2017 has been a remarkable year that’s brought continued growth and awareness. We expect the new year 2018 to be filled with new excitements and innovations. But, there’s still a common question to understand these fast-moving digital phenomena.

To understand the next innovations that are set to usher in over the course of 2018, we discussed with Mark Papermaster, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President - Technology and Engineering, AMD.

Technological developments, we can expect in 2018

Mark Papermaster, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President - Technology and Engineering, AMD

We are entering a new era defined by billions of connected devices and if you look at the major trends in the IT industry – like VR and AR, artificial and machine intelligence, deep learning, self-driving vehicles and cloud computing – they have one thing in common: they all require vast amounts of processing power to manage the explosion of data resulting from these technology implementations. In addition, new forms of financial management that leverage blockchains for applications like cryptocurrency and banking ledgers will expand demand for high performance. As a result, there is an incredible resurgence in overall semiconductor demand.

We used to rely on Moore’s Law – i.e. every 18 months you could double the number of transistors in an integrated circuit and increase performance – this has slowed down. So now we need to be more innovative to stay on this pace. The industry will still rely on new semiconductor process nodes, but we now have to design it in such a way that you are putting more types of solutions together on the chip – heterogeneous solutions with different types of computer solutions (CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and other specialized processors), more aggressive use of different types of memory, and combining all this for hardware and software system optimizations. We will see this type of engineering innovation in 2018 and beyond to stay on the historical Moore’s Law pace. You will also see innovative approaches to system engineering for CPU / GPU and other computer elements so that they function optimally.

Tech-innovations to keep an eye on

We will roll-out new high-performance computing and graphics products in 2018. We will be looking at new form factors that can leverage more computation capabilities at lower power. With Ryzen Mobile processors, we have a strong player in this space. We will work along with our OEM partners, that will bring thin and light notebooks, delivering long battery life and fast performance.

AMD roadmap for 2018

In 2017, we re-established ourselves as a high-performance computing leader with the introduction and ramp of 10 different product families – AMD’s strongest portfolio of the last decade. In 2018, we will build on this momentum, with new CPUs and GPUs that bring more features and more performance to a broad set of markets.

At CES 2018, AMD announced its first desktop Ryzen processors with built-in Radeon Vega Graphics, and a full line up of Ryzen mobile APUs, including the new Ryzen PRO and Ryzen 3 models. We expect to have a 12nm, 2nd generation Ryzen desktop CPU by the April timeframe. In graphics, we will expand the "Vega" architecture-based family with Radeon Vega Mobile GPUs. This razor-thin GPU is designed to enable new, powerful gaming notebooks in 2018 with extraordinary performance and incredible efficiency. We will be sampling the first 7nm product, a Radeon Instinct "Vega" GPU specifically built for machine learning applications. At CES 2018, we introduced the industry's first top to bottom open solution with our Radeon Open Ecosystem (ROCm) platform. It also features an easy to deploy porting capability from NVIDIA CUDA.

The server market will be a big focus area for us. In 2017, we re-entered the server market in a big way with our EPYC processors. We brought innovation back to the market with a high-performance processor with groundbreaking system features and unique security allowing for a truly differentiated system creating substantial TCO opportunities for end customers. HPE, Microsoft Azure and Baidu have announced EPYC processor-based deployments and we are expecting to expand this customer base in 2018.