The demand for PCs was unprecedented in 2020: Vinay Sinha, MD – Sales, AMD India

Most IT services, global enterprises and consulting companies placed large orders for work notebooks, desktops, and workstations to provide employees the required systems to work from home as part of their business continuity planning. The demand led to the highest annual growth in over a decade in traditional PC market, says Vinay Sinha, managing director – Sales, AMD India. As per IDC, in the fourth quarter of 2020, global shipments grew 26.1% year over year to 91.6 million units.

“The pandemic also pushed the demand for cloud to support digital transformation across industries. We saw companies across the spectrum, from small and medium enterprises to large enterprises, investing in cloud-based applications to support business agility and remote work,” he tells Sudhir Chowdhary in a recent interview. Excerpts:

What are the challenges facing IT decision makers currently and how is AMD positioned to address these?
COVID-19 accelerated digital transformation across companies. Today organisations are focused on setting up dynamic, agile, robust, and secure IT infrastructure that can meet the changing demands of modern workloads. The disruption brought about by the pandemic, has made this the central concern for IT decision makers. They are asking – how can we ensure our organisation’s hardware, software, network resources and services are reliable, accessible 24×7 and work in tandem. They are looking at migrating to cloud to optimise workload performance, maintain scalability and free up resources for other business-critical needs. They want to secure end user data and reduce the total cost of ownership as they transition to virtualised environments.

AMD is well positioned to support IT decision makers in these digital transformation journeys with a host of AMD powered solutions both in PC and data centre. Notebooks and desktops powered by AMD Ryzen PRO processors are available from all major OEMs and they are increasingly being adopted across small businesses and large enterprises.
When it comes to data centres, AMD has just launched the 3rd Gen EPYC which is the world’s highest performing x86 server processors. The new EPYC 7003 series processors help HPC, cloud and enterprise customers do more, faster, by delivering the best performance of any server CPU with up to 19% more instructions per clock.

How has AMD grown in the enterprise segment over the last few years?
Our success is driven by AMD setting the pace of innovation in the industry, and consistently delivering products that help bend the curve on performance, power efficiency, TCO and time to value. This was reflected in our fourth quarter and 2020 earnings announcement. We had record server processor sales in the Q4 of 2020, as cloud, enterprise and supercomputing adoption grew. Cloud adoption remained strong in the fourth quarter as Google, Microsoft, Tencent, and others expanded their use of EPYC processors to power larger portions of their internal infrastructure. Twenty-eight new public cloud instances were launched in the fourth quarter from Alibaba, AWS, and Oracle, while Google expanded general availability of their confidential computing VMs powered exclusively by EPYC processors to nine regions.

In enterprise, the adoption of AMD-powered servers also grew in the fourth quarter of 2020 as Dell, HPE and Lenovo secured new end customer wins with Fortune 1000 accounts across key verticals, including manufacturing, financial services, and automotive. In HPC, the number of AMD-powered supercomputers on the November 2020 top 500 list increased to 21 systems, including two of the top 10 and the fastest supercomputer in Europe.

What is the data centre opportunity for AMD in India?
India continues to be an important market for AMD’s data centre business, and we will continue to invest in the country. India is the second largest data centre market in Asia-Pacific after China. This market growth is fueled by digitisation initiatives from the government, increasing penetration of internet connectivity, as well as adoption of emerging technologies like AI, Big Data and ML by not only technology companies but also traditional legacy companies.

We see growth opportunities for AMD in data heavy sectors including e-commerce, e-Seva, finance, government, IT, manufacturing, and telecommunications. As India gets ready for 5G network, we believe that the telecom sector will be one of the key sectors that will adopt high-performance server CPUs over the next 2-3 years. They will have to put in place the data processing infrastructure that will allow faster delivery of internet, content, and seamless roll out of a host of next gen 5G applications.

What is AMD’s strategy for growth and investments to build this segment in India?
We are entering a high-performance computing megacycle driven by the increasing adoption of cloud computing services and the accelerating digital transformation of businesses as well as the rise of 5G and AI. We will tap this opportunity by closely collaborating with top global and regional cloud providers as well as OEMs. We will focus on highlighting the compelling value proposition of EPYC powered data centers to CIOs and CTOs through various outreach activities.