Mark Papermaster, the Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice-President (Technology and Engineering) of US semiconductor firm AMD, talks about the increasing demand for higher processing power to make sense of the humongous amounts of data that is being produced as machine learning, virtual reality and IoT devices becoming all pervasive.

With over 35 years of industry experience, Mark led key engineering teams at top firms such as Cisco, Apple and IBM before joining AMD in 2011. Recently, in Hyderabad, he talked about AMD’s growth plans for India and the impact of Raja Koduri’s, who served as the Chief Architect of Radeon Technologies group , resignation. Excerpts:

Semiconductor industry traditionally follows a cyclical pattern — a few years of resurgence and then a slump and then a revival. Do you think it will overcome this pattern?

I think it’s a historic opportunity for the semiconductor industry to shift from the cyclical behaviour to an extended period of growth. The reason I believe in this is because the new workload demands of virtual reality, augmented reality and machine learning require high computation power.

There is demand for greater computation because we are having an explosion of data. IoT devices are getting embedded all around you: it’s in your thermostat, in your refrigerator, the electronics in your car. To process all this data you need more CPU and Graphics computation power.

This will result in growth in the overall semiconductor industry and the expectation is that it will continue to rise.

When do you think AMD products will be commodified in India? You lag behind when it comes to mind share. When do yo see your technologies reaching larger masses?

I see mind share gains for AMD to be significant in 2018. We launched these new products in 2017 and we are doing aggressive marketing. People are using our products and are seeing the tremendous value that AMD provides. It takes some time to gain mind share from the time of delivery of a product.

How will Raja Koduri’s leaving AMD affect the company? How do you see continuity in the area he was driving?

Raja made excellent contributions toward really accelerating the growth of our Radeon product line. We have a very strong leadership team. So there is no change to our roadmap; it remains on track. We see absolute continuation of the product roadmap and partnerships that we have developed over the years.

Will his departure impact the India connect for AMD?

We have a very strong presence in India. We have over 1,500 employees. Our ties are very strong and we expect to grow these partnerships in India.

Content creation with Radeon is one part of the business. We are growing share in India with our commercial PCs. We are now in conversation with service providers to deploy AMD EPYC in datacentres in India.

So, we have a much bigger engagement in India based on all the new products that we launched in 2017.

What is India's contribution in AMD’s growth?

The operations in India are central to our global product development. Teams here contribute across our product portfolio. They support in developing the building blocks of CPU and GPUs — both hardware and software — and also the end product that is the chip. So, our team in India are involved in almost every facet of our product development activities.

You had announced retail outlets in India with partners such as HP. Any plans to expand them?

We will do a lot of online promotion. We want to leverage the expanding online commerce space. Having said that our new designs will be both online and available in retail. So, HP Envy 260, the HP notebook is available in online and retail stores. We have a HP-AMD store in Gurgaon and will look at expanding that with other OEM partners.

What are you doing in movies and entertainment space? For instance, you partnered with the Baahubali team

Baahubali really demonstrated how our technology can provide better immersive experience with rich graphics and technology that allow really high-speed photo rendering. Baahubali also had VR. It showcased that on AMD Radeon, we can provide life-like virtual reality. It was an excellent partnership.

We will continue to grow our presence in entertainment as well as in the overall content creation space with professional workstations that demand outstanding content creation capabilities.

This week, Apple began shipping the iMac Pro featuring Radeon Pro Vega graphics. It has a 5K display and leadership content creation capabilities.