AMD's World-Beating New Chips Have Indian Engrs At Their Core

Their processors are running data centres and the world’s fastest supercomputers

- Akhil George

For a decade starting around 2007, it looked like AMD had been demolished by Intel, both in the PC and server processor markets. And then, almost like the phoenix rising from its ashes, AMD rose again. It has been a spectacular rise over the past four years. And it began with the launch of a new server processor called EPYC.

EPYC is now into its 3rd generation. And AMD’s India engineers have had a central role to play in every generation of EPYC. The first EPYC, based on a x86 core architecture design called Zen, was built from scratch with major contributions from the India teams in Bengaluru and Hyderabad. The updated 2nd generation version was released two years later and set over 170 world records in data centre CPU performance, security, and scalability. The 3rd generation, AMD’s latest 7 nanometre chip and codenamed Milan, was launched earlier this year and is considered the world’s fastest server processor. Crucial aspects of it – both hardware and software – were built out of India.

Designing the Hardware

Jaya Jagadish is country head at AMD India. She is also corporate vice president of silicon design engineering, and heads the cores team at AMD India, which is responsible for the development of the CPU or processor core. “In a processor there is something called the system on chip (SoC). The SoC contains several building blocks called IPs. The SoC team takes all the different IPs, connects them and stitches them together. We then verify the entire system, to make sure that the system is doing what it is supposed to be doing. We also do a lot of stress tests to ensure we have a system capable of being used in high-performance computers,” Jagadish says.