By Editor
Few segments in IT are as demanding as the gaming community, where high end computing is just the beginning. To keep the growing regional gaming community riveted, AMD’s advanced APU and graphic card solutions today power some of the biggest selling consoles in the market
Recent reports by IDC point to a surge in gaming in the Middle East in an industry now worth USD 2.6 billion in the region according to the research firm, with console-based gaming the biggest revenue driver.
AMD, which powers some of the most popular consoles around, stands to benefit from this boom. “We are very focused on the Middle East, talking to the market about our company, showcasing our products at events such as GITEX and demonstrating our strong portfolio of products,” said Neil Spicer, EMEA MPU Senior Sales Manager – Component Channel. The company’s strength lies in the integrity of its products, adds Neil. “We are a product driven company with fantastic IP from our CPU architectures past and present to our GPU’s IP and architecture.”
“Graphics is in AMD’s DNA and we aspire to be the leader in the gaming industry through building the highest-quality graphics cards. Sitting atop the desktop graphics product stack we have the Radeon R9 295X2, the fastest graphics card on the planet. Both the liquid-cooling solution and price points were very well received across the market.” To highlight this commitment to quality graphics, and directly engage with the local gaming community, AMD has held tournaments for gamers in the region and, during GITEX 2014, AMD’s booth played host to the latest in gaming tech as well as a tournament for pro gamers.
The company maintains a solid channel strategy in the region with ASBIS as master distributor for CPUs for the UAE and other Gulf countries. “Beyond that, our channel strategy is pretty simple – we win if our customers win,” Neil explains. “AMD has introduced several global initiatives to support the channel, including MEA. In particular the AMD Partner Program is a tiered loyalty program to acknowledge and celebrate AMD’s most valued global partners. This program is a priority for us, with the aim of providing greater access to information and support to empower channel partners to design, build and sell AMD technology. AMD also works with other key technology partners in the region such as motherboard assemblers like ASUS, Biostar and ASRock as well as graphic cards companies.
Although a legacy desktop/notebook solutions provider, AMD is cognizant of shifts underway in the industry with mobile gaming highly popular today. “Our strategy for 2015 is to generate approximately 40% of the company’s revenue from our high-growth markets such as ultra low-power client, embedded, professional graphics, semi-custom and dense servers,” added Neil.
However, for the semi and pro gamer, the desktop remains king due to the sheer capabilities of the modern gaming computer, with features such as HD gaming and top of the range graphics not replicable on mobile. “The assessment from our customers is towards the more mainstream segments of the market. The true enthusiasts and pro gamers don’t want to step away from the desktop because the expectation towards the solution is that it has to be fast where every millisecond counts,” said Neil, adding, “We see trends for customers to be able to work and game on the same machine and we believe we are perfectly set up for this trend with the right products.”
Consumer demands drive the chip business, depending on what customers priorities are with their devices. Whether its heat dissipation or core graphics or a top of the range CPU, AMD believes it has the right product mix for the various applications. “We engineer products for many markets. We have a full range of devices ranging from a PC running our 9590 water cooled CPU at 5GHz and with a USD 1,000 graphics card, to a notebook running our A10 APU. These are vastly different markets and AMD has an offering for everyone,” Neil explained.
An APU is a system on a chip that combines a CPU with a GPU on a single die. The process of creating APU capabilities at AMD came when AMD acquired ATI in 2006, bringing together a CPU company and a GPU manufacturer. Over the years, engineers at AMD have worked to figure out how to build an APU, which is basically an X86 CPU with high end graphics in one product which is what we are shipping with notebooks today.
Battery power is one area where customer frustration comes to bear. From a pure compute power performance element, some CPUs have got great capabilities with strong horse power. That has them ahead of the game but this means that the system has to ramp up the energy and this drains battery power really fast. AMD’s approach, Neil says, is extending the cores on the CPU. So instead of having four cores AMD installs twelve compute cores and then adopts the master/slave approach, explains Neil. “If we use a highway analogy, a graphic core can calculate as powerfully as a CPU core but with 12 lanes, you do not have to drive up your consumption of power. Performance is the same but you get where you are going much more efficiently. So battery consumption is very efficient because if you spread them across 12 lanes, you get your workloads done because the work is spread across a larger number of cores. That’s as efficient as can be. AMD is constantly innovating to improve performance and minimize power use. In fact AMD has a goal to deliver a 25x improvement in the energy efficiency of its APUs by 2020, achieved via design optimizations, intelligent power management and Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) advances. Neil concluded by saying, “First and foremost, AMD is here to build great products and enable our customers to be successful – that is our clear focus and that is where we will continue to focus our investments.”