Technology Reseller v38

01732 759725 24 Q&A starting the conversation early. It’s our goal to become the leading supplier of data centre hardware. AMD is also heavily involved in designing hardware and systems on which to run blockchain. Q: What are the biggest differentiators between AMD and its competitors? Mario Silveira: We go the extra mile to make our customers happy. This ethos is most obvious when you think about AMD’s technologies. For instance, our research and development teams have done amazing work in producing the world’s first 7nm x86 processors and the subsequent ‘Zen 2’ core. This effort has borne fruit in the form of the AMD Ryzen Threadripper family, the world’s fastest high-end desktop processors. AMD is also the only company to have high-performance CPUs and GPUs. The Ryzen 9 5900X Desktop Processors are the fastest desktop processors available. Similarly, AMD Radeon RX 5700 Graphics is one of the fastest graphics processors on the market today, delivering exceptional performance and high-fidelity gaming. Q: Has the pandemic changed the market for computing hardware and associated technologies? Mario Silveira: It has. Sales of desktop and laptop PCs have grown strongly in the last year, simply because so many people have had to work from home – initially, at very short notice. Many employers weren’t able to provide staff with the equipment they needed, hence the surge in demand. Now that organisations have had a chance to take stock and review the situation, we are seeing more companies invest in new technology and devices directly, which will help people continue to adapt to a more distributed working model, with most companies investing in technology to enable more comfortable and effective remote working. This trend is likely to continue. The pandemic has accelerated business digital transformation globally. Millions of consumers are working, shopping and playing online, so companies have had to adapt at speed. An awful lot of that Mario Silveira has been AMD’s head of business development for EMEA since March 2019, with responsibility for crafting the company’s go-to-market strategy and working with partners to ensure AMD continues to meet customers’ changing needs. Here, he tells us about the semiconductor company’s plans for 2021. Q: What are AMD’s priorities for 2021 and beyond? Mario Silveira: A big part of AMD’s success is its relationship with partners, integrators and suppliers. As head of business development in EMEA, one of my main priorities is to build on the many strengths of those connections — strengths that I have witnessed first-hand during the pandemic. They will ensure AMD continues to grow, while protecting and improving the robust, resilient supply-chain relationships that are going to be so crucial to our success in the coming years. For instance, the roll-out of 5G in many markets is creating demand for new data centre hardware and technologies. There are no pre-existing preferences there, so AMD is adaptation has been made possible by technologies, such as virtualisation, that enable greater flexibility and scalability. This, in turn, will increase demand for data centres, servers and more powerful and sophisticated silicon. Factor in the trends towards big data, AI and automation and it’s an interesting time to be in technology, and especially in silicon design and manufacture. Q: Across AMD’s product lines and segments (CPUs and GPUs – consumer, server, enterprise and games consoles) what are the long-term trends transforming the industry? Mario Silveira: The biggest trend is towards performance. If you look at the enterprise market, for instance, you need high-performance graphics to enable virtualisation, cloud computing, AI and a lot of the other emerging technologies on which the next phase of business development will depend. To give one example, if you’re going to virtualise most of your network infrastructure, rather than running a lot of separate hardware switches and load balancers, the server you run those virtual devices on needs to be high spec. In the consumer space, deep-level improvements in our product architectures from the introduction of 7nm based designs (think Lego Technic, rather than Lego Duplo) have injected real movement into the race for performance. End users are, quite rightly, very demanding. If I am paying for a mobile device, for instance, I want it to give me the same kind of performance and experience I’d get from a desktop. If that laptop is in my home office, that performance isn’t just for day-to-day office applications; it also needs to run Minecraft or Fortnite for when I kick back in the evening and play with my children. It’s the job of hardware manufacturers to keep up with these varied demands. Finally, when you look at the sheer scale of data in 2020 and beyond, AMD is really gearing up in the data centre to handle the megatrends impacting business and society, such as artificial intelligence. With Mario Silveira, Corporate Vice President, EMEA, AMD Q&A Mario Silveira

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