From Tom's Hardware: I met with AMD CEO Mark Papermaster on the sidelines of ITF World, a conference hosted by semiconductor research firm imec in Antwerp, Belgium, for an interview to discuss some of AMD’s plans for the future. The highlights of our talk include Papermaster’s revelation that AMD will bring hybrid architectures to its lineup of consumer processors in the future. These types of designs use larger cores designed for performance mixed in with smaller efficiency cores, much like Intel’s 13th-Gen chips. Papermaster also spoke about AMD’s current use of AI in its semiconductor design, testing and verification phases, and about the challenges associated with the company’s plans to use generative AI more extensively for chip design in the future.
Mark Papermaster has served as AMD’s Chief Technical Officer (CTO) and SVP/EVP of Technology and Engineering since 2011. He's directed AMD's technology development for over a decade, laying the cornerstones of technology that powered the company’s resurgence against industry stalwart Intel, giving him incredible insight into the company's past, present, and future.
You might not have heard of the Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre (imec) before, but it ranks among the most important companies in the world. Think of imec as a silicon Switzerland, of sorts. While the semiconductor research-focused imec doesn’t grab the flashbulbs, it serves as the quiet cornerstone of the industry, bringing fierce rivals like AMD, Intel, Nvidia, TSMC, and Samsung together with chip toolmakers such as ASML and Applied Materials, not to mention the critical semiconductor software design companies (EDA) like Cadence and Synopsys, among others, in a non-competitive environment. This collaboration allows the companies to work together to define the roadmap of the next generation of tools and software they will use to design and manufacture the chips that power the world.
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