BENGALURU: In PC and server chips, AMD is a distant second to Intel . Every now and then, it shows enormous promise. In 2006, its share of PC processors touched a high of 25%. But then, it suffered a dramatic fall. The slump was protracted, close to eight years. Now, the company is once again seeing a resurgence.And this time, its India engineering centres in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, which it started building in 2004, can take a lot of credit. “The team in India played a critical role in designing AMD’s latest x86 Zen processor core that’s behind the company’s revival,” Mark Papermaster , AMD’s chief technology officer, told TOI on a visit to India.The x86 Zen processor core was key to AMD’s return to high performance computing in desktops with its Ryzen processors , and in datacentres with server processors that it calls EPYC Papermaster said the India team also integrates components to create system-on-chips (SoCs) and develops software enablement to power devices for PCs, graphics, and server products. “We have a highly innovative and talented local team which is integral to our global R&D workforce,” he said.Papermaster, who was in IBM, Apple and Cisco before moving to AMD, has been the architect of the latest revival. When he came in 2011, he took the tough decision to redesign the company’s flagship Zen architecture. Such redesigns in the semiconductor business take time. But it’s now paying off.In the last quarter, AMD’s share of PCs stood at 11.7%, up from 8.9% in the fourth quarter of 2017, according to PC component market research firm Mercury Research. In servers, where it is a more recent entrant, the share doubled from 0.8% to 1.6% in the same period. The company’s share price, which was at about $2 in early 2016, is now at $21.Jaya Jagadish, corporate vice president and head of the India centre, said the company embarked on the journey to build a new CPU (central processing unit) core three years ago. “The India team helped build the core CPU design. One of the team’s main responsibilities today is to take that core and spin off different variants,” she said.One CPU cannot fit the needs of all products, form factors or customer needs. It needs to be customised – either a smaller memory or larger memory, or a faster memory, or more power efficient, etc. “Most of this work happens out of India,” Jagadish said. In servers, the SoC work for the new EPYC was done out of India.In chip development, there are multiple steps involved. There is the process of defining the chip, in terms of the features – such as speed, memory, power efficiency – it should have. That’s based on expectations of what customers will need and what should be technically possible. Then IP (intellectual property) cores are designed for each of the features the chip requires. The challenge here is to ensure faster speeds and more memory, and do these in a smaller space, so that power consumption falls (because there’s less cabling) and the end device can be made more compact. And then there’s the SoC process, where the IP cores are brought together as a single chip. The challenge here is to ensure they all work together, and the SoC runs the applications the chip is designed for. Finally, there’s software on top of these to put SoC devices into action and control them.Jagadish says AMD has huge teams in India for IP, SoC and software. India has over 1,200 of AMD’s 9,500 employees. Papermaster said the opportunity engineers in India have to work on almost all aspects of chip development makes the company a particularly attractive place.“Overall, we find the skills to be very, very good here. But particularly around two areas – VLSI (very large scale integration), which is the design of the semiconductor devices needed for high performance processors, and also software development. Both of those areas are critical to us to fuel our future,” he said.India also has a large software team for AMD’s GPU (graphics processing unit), which are used in the gaming consoles of Sony and Microsoft and which compete with Nvidia. “The plan is to build a large GPU SoC team as well in India,” Jagadish said.Is India moving towards creating architects who define the chip? “We have made good progress over the years to build that skillset,” Jagadish said, and added that the plan is to strengthen it in the next five years. “There is immense opportunity,” she said.