In a one on one with PC Quest, Matthew Zielinski – Corporate Vice
President and General Manager, WW MNC Sales, AMD shares the
roadmap of processor development in AMD’s new product Ryzen Pro.
What kind of processor development has been done for professionals?
This is not something that has happened quickly. It is a four-year investment that AMD has made where we want to redesign CPU from the ground up. That takes so many different paths, but we looked particularly at the ‘Zen’ architecture that’s really the combination of two million plus engineering hours and four
years of work. We got a lot of talented design engineers from around the industry to help us with this and, combiningall that, delivered revolutionary performance stats, probably the best part we have
had in the last decade. We have introduced new technology we haven’t had previously. One of those is SMT (simultaneous multithreading) and we are offering more cores, more threads and ultimately more performance. What end users care about is
getting more productivity, better multitasking, and being more efficient during a work day. There’s a large part of the market where we have mainstream/power users that are bottlenecked today.
They need more performance and that’s exactly what we have done.
We are taking away these bottlenecks by offering new architecture and threading capability, on top of many other features. This is what we provide with Ryzen PRO. One thing that I want to expand a little bit further are some of the power features. We have reached a point where it’s not just about performance, it’s equally important that we are reducing the power, and creating more energy efficient technology. When we designed the ‘Zen’ architecture, we very much had that energy efficiency and battery life in mind as well. A lot of the power features that you saw are very relevant. Just as we increase performance, we reduce the level of power that’s directly going to translate to longer battery life in Ryzen PRO mobile. But even in a desktop, it means lower energy consumption. This is very relevant for big corporations in India and this is going to be one
of the biggest focus areas for India. Another feature that is key for the Indian commercial market with Ryzen PRO is its security features.
Is Ryzen PRO a completely new product?
It is a completely new architecture. The other thing that’s exciting about it is that we have caught up with our competition on the process technology. With respect to power and energy efficiency and some of the security features as well, we may even have some
advantages now.
Is EPYC a new architecture?
It is all fundamentally based on the same ‘Zen’ architecture and as I shared, it is abrand-new product for the server space. For the client and server space, we have a roadmap that allows to sustain this kind of leadership, on both one or two socket servers as well as commercial notebooks and desktops.
What is your opinion on open source operating system and security?
We recognize the importance of supporting other operating systems specifically for India. A Ryzen PRO will help empower Linux based solutions that we will enable. At a global level, Windows 10 is the
biggest operating system.One of the strengths that we have in our seventh generation, sixth generation technology is the ability to support windows 7 for an extended period for our customers who are not ready to transition to a new OS.
Are you entering in the mobile (phone) segment?
It’s an internal terminology for AMD when we say Ryzen PRO Mobile.What we mean by that is Ryzen PRO for laptops. We launched Ryzen Mobile in the consumer space recently. With the help our partners, we now have a suite of the world’s most powerful
ultra-thin notebooks. Thinner, lighter notebooks are extremely powerful and that’s one of the areas we will see Ryzen PRO really succeed – because of both the performance and the power improvements.
In terms of Indian market, how do you see AMD growing?
From the commercial standpoint, we are right up there. We are one of the biggest contributors in commercial market worldwide. High market share and high penetration in one of the markets where
we have resources as evangelists touching the end customers directly is our goal. We were doing well in the India commercial andpublic-sector space, and this was the pre-Ryzen PRO era. When you have a product like Ryzen PRO coming in, then we have a distinct advantage vis-à-vis the competition.With so much momentum already established, I think the only way we can go in India is up.