Today AMD celebrates its 55th anniversary. AMD has a rich history of innovation, yet the incredible AI inflection point we find ourselves in today marks a new era of opportunity and impact for our company. We made the call over a decade ago to leverage our strength and heritage in high-performance computing and invest for the future. Those bets have paid off as all our markets now demand the utmost in compute efficiency (performance per Watt of energy expended), and AI enablement. With that in mind, as we mark this milestone, I’d like to reflect on the last five years of innovation and impact at AMD and look forward to what we can expect in the next five.
Since our 50th anniversary in 2019, AMD and the semiconductor industry have grown tremendously. Global sales of semiconductors grew from $412.3B in 2019i, to $574.1B in 2022, and are estimated to grow to $1T by 2030ii. AI is the most exciting and significant technology disruption in a lifetime, and AMD is positioned to service our customers’ insatiable demand for more computing capacity with our leadership products and roadmap.
Timed with this incredible market growth, we’ve significantly expanded our engineering talent pool with the best and brightest minds to deliver some of the world’s most advanced chips, software, and enterprise AI solutions. Our global team has more than doubled in the past five years as we’ve welcomed more than 15,000 new employees. Xilinx was the largest semiconductor acquisition when completed in 2022 adding incredible talent, leadership IP, and market expansion to adaptive compute markets with deep customer relationships. The Pensando acquisition also brought a highly programmable Network chip and key skills, and most recently Mipsology and Nod.ai have bolstered our AI software capabilities.
To keep pace with the growing demand for compute performance and efficiency, and to drive ongoing innovation at AMD, we’ve steadily increased our investment in research and development over the last five years. Over that time, our research and development investment has nearly quadrupled, from $1.5B in 2019, to $5.9B in 2023, and we plan to continue to invest in developing groundbreaking technologies that show early promise.
We have the right talent and right products. AMD is uniquely positioned with a broad high performance and AI accelerated portfolio across supercomputing, cloud, edge, embedded, and personal computing. A decade ago, we took a strategic bet on a modular approach to design and delivered industry first x86 CPU and GPU chiplet designs. Last year at our Advancing AI event we were joined by the world's leading hyperscalers and OEMs as we debuted the AMD Instinct MI300 Series accelerators, featuring chips stacked both horizontally and vertically, delivering leadership AI inferencing at scale and competitive large language model training and competition to this rapidly growing market. Our growth hasn’t come overnight. AMD technology powers the daily lives of billions of people around the world, and in the last five years we’ve expanded the number of markets we serve.
Our technologies underpin 30% of the world’s servers and 140 of the Top500 supercomputers in the world, including eight of the top 10 most energy-efficient supercomputers, which are currently in use by researchers to solve some of the world’s most critical challenges from cancer to climate research and much more. Our embedded solutions are enabling the future of robotic-assisted surgery, the next generation of vehicles from top car manufacturers, the next wave of telecommunications in 5G and beyond, and incredible discoveries aboard the Mars Rover. AMD also leads in gaming consoles, and was first to market in AI PCs, with millions shipped to date.
Data centers will keep enabling new AI experiences at scale, but PCs will also let users interact with AI every day. We’re witnessing a significant growth of local AI applications for both personal and business purposes. With this increase of local AI comes a higher demand for incorporating AI engines in client and end devices. We were the first company to bring AI to PCs over a year ago by integrating a dedicated neural processing unit (NPU) on an x86 processor. These dedicated AI engines handle local AI applications efficiently, offering better performance and battery life in popular devices like ultrathin laptops. We have exciting announcements at Computex this June.
We don’t believe the next five years of advancement will be realized by a single company, product, or vision. The future of technology will be born from open ecosystems and deep industry partnerships that drive true innovation. We’re in a unique position to power increased demand for AI compute based on our broad portfolio of compute engines, deep relationships with customers across a diverse set of markets, and open software capabilities. We have a strong foundation of data center products and customer collaboration across cloud and enterprise, and leadership products for AI PCs.
AI is transforming the way we create and deliver our products at AMD. We have shifted from unique product silo development with its own software stacks to a modular IP portfolio with resulting products connected by a single AI software stack that will make deployment easy for developers and users. This is a solution-oriented approach that goes beyond our previous achievements. Our new approach must consider the optimization from silicon to software to the final applications, it is a holistic design approach. Comprehensive design solutions that consider all these factors will keep us on a Moore's Law pace with exponential growth of both improved performance and increased energy efficiency despite less transistor gains in each new process node. Also, we need to speed our development by using more AI applications in our internal workflows to boost our productivity. Our engineering culture is driven by innovation and big challenges like this. This is a chance to welcome change and new thinking. We look forward to discovering new methods to optimize efficiency and experiment with new technologies that have potential.
This inflection point is truly unprecedented and exciting. AI is poised to become more ubiquitous and consequential than the advent of the Internet. As AMD turns 55, I am excited to collaborate with world class AMD engineers, customers and industry partners who are guided by a data-centric culture of innovation to usher in the next era of adaptive and high-performance computing.
Mark Papermaster is CTO and EVP of Technology & Engineering at AMD.
[i] https://www.semiconductors.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/SIA_State-of-Industry-Report_2023_Final_07...
[ii] https://www.semiconductors.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/SIA_State-of-Industry-Report_2023_Final_07...
CAUTIONARY STATEMENT
This blog contains forward-looking statements concerning Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) such as AI technology trends; AI opportunities for AMD; AMD’s expectations in the next five years; AMD’s ability to service its customers for their future computing capacity needs; AMD’s future investments in research and development; AMD’s ability to support increased demand for AI compute; and the expected impact of AI on AMD’s ability to create and deliver its future products, which are made pursuant to the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are commonly identified by words such as "would," "may," "expects," "believes," "plans," "intends," "projects" and other terms with similar meaning. Investors are cautioned that the forward-looking statements in this blog are based on current beliefs, assumptions and expectations, speak only as of the date of this blog and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from current expectations. Such statements are subject to certain known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which are difficult to predict and generally beyond AMD's control, that could cause actual results and other future events to differ materially from those expressed in, or implied or projected by, the forward-looking information and statements. Investors are urged to review in detail the risks and uncertainties in AMD’s Securities and Exchange Commission filings, including but not limited to AMD’s most recent reports on Forms 10-K and 10-Q. AMD does not assume, and hereby disclaims, any obligation to update forward-looking statements made in this blog, except as may be required by law.
