AMD Touts Custom Chip Unit To Battle PC Decline

Advanced Micro Devices is following its own path in order to lessen its reliance on the shrinking PC market and help it return to profitability.

To this end, AMD officials are hoping that the company’s ability to build unique processors for customers will assist in its turnaround.

Custom Chips

AMD executives, including CEO Rory Read, have been talking about embedded and semi-custom chips as being a cornerstone in the turnaround of an embattled company that – like rival Intel and OEMs Hewlett-Packard and Dell – has been battered by slowing PC sales worldwide. The company picked up a significant win last month when Sony said it would use AMD chips in its upcoming PlayStation 4 game console.

Now, the company is officially unveiling a business unit that will focus on the custom chip business. AMD on May 2 announced its Semi-Custom Business Unit whose job it is to leverage the wide range of intellectual property (IP) throughout the company to design and build one-of-a-kind chip solutions for customers. The company has high hopes for the business – Read has said he expects it to account for as much as 20 percent of AMD’s overall revenue by the end of the year.

“Embedded and semi-custom are growth areas for AMD,” Saeid Moshkelani, corporate vice president and general manager at AMD, told eWEEK.

AMD began organising the business last year, and has brought in hundreds of engineers, as well as business and development workers, to it, said Moshkelani, who came to AMD last year from Trident Microsystems. They will work with the company’s IP around processors, graphics and multimedia to create custom chips for a wide range of devices, from gaming consoles and set-top boxes to tablets, smart TVs, notebooks and servers.

The engineers will use a modular approach to building the custom systems-on-a-chip (SoCs), reusing AMD’s silicon IP and design building blocks that can then be integrated with the customer’s own IP to create the unique solutions.

Charles King, principle analyst with Pund-IT Research, said the custom-chip route is a good one for AMD, but also one on which other chip makers – particularly those who, like AMD, are seeing greater pressure on their traditional markets, such as PCs – are heading. The ease by which chip makers now can integrate high-end graphics capabilities with standard CPUs is helping drive this trend, King said in an email to eWEEK.

“In the past, delivering those capabilities for, say, game console clients required a huge amount of custom work, up to and including developing entirely new graphics platforms (like the Cell technologies Sony, IBM and Toshiba developed for Sony’s PS3),” he wrote.

Company Turnaround

AMD’s Moshkelani said that for customers, being able to use custom SoCs optimised for their particular systems is a key differentiator in markets that can be crowded with competitors.