AMD talks CES 2021 keynote, plans – Video

I’m Ashley [UNKNOWN] and you’re watching CNET’s live coverage of CES 2021.
I’m here in my office in Sunny Southern California.
We’ve got IS Actor in his villains layer, his volcano villains layer in New York City.
And we also have today, we’re really excited to welcome Jason Banta AMD’s corporate vice president and general manager Client OEM.
To talk with us about the AMD keynote that we saw earlier this morning.
Hi Jason.
Hello.
Thank you for having me on obviously a very different CES this year, so, thank you for bringing me on to talk about, talk about everything we’re doing at CES this year.
And everything you AMD is doing at CES is quite a bit.
If somebody maybe missed the keynote earlier today or hasn’t gotten a chance to keep up or catch up with the news, can you sort of get us up to speed on what they might have missed?
Yeah, so it was a very big announcement, I think to put it mildly.
We Lisa just finished her keynote to a worldwide audience.
They’re here at CES, big moment and mobile computing.
I think that was the big piece of what she announced.
The Rise In 5000 mobile, really upping the game.
That builds upon the success of what we did with Rise In 4000 series of processors.
Bringing in the all new Zen 3 core, which is a higher performance, richer experiences, longer battery life, really everything you’re looking for in a notebook.
Raising 4000 was welcomed with open arms by Nv fans and a lot of people who were unfamiliar with ryzen So, taking that to the next with rising 5000 disrupting that space even further was a big part of this announcement.
Normally we have to wait, six months between a new Korean desktop and a new new Korean mobile.
But we really doubled down our efforts, you know, real testament to our engineering team to, you know, to roll out Zen three in the mobile space with ryzen 5000.
So, again, speaks to the creativity of, you know, overall engineering team.
You know, the really the highlight of that from a From a product perspective was the rising 95980 Ajax, quite simply the fastest mobile processor in the world.
Eight cores 20 Meg’s of cash 4.8 gig booze, phenomenal overall product.
Really outclassing the competition and bringing bringing a reason to upgrade into the into the high performance notebook space.>> I faced and I definitely I definitely feel like I need to upgrade my machine this year now after having seen all of the different.
Processors and graphics cards, everything that pretty much everybody is launching and announcing at CES this year is super appealing.
And to me as somebody who hasn’t built a computer in a few years, but I know that I as an AI were really surprised to see some of the partnerships you guys had, do you want to talk a little bit about what we saw and and who we saw and why it’s interesting.
Thing I mean, this keynote looked like.
I’m just gonna say it can look like an old Intel one because AMD is with has some amazing partners.
I saw HP out there, I saw Lenovo out there, I saw the Mercedes F1 form of the racing team up there.
And I think what was the most conspicuous was Panos Panay, from Microsoft, hanging out with you guys at AMD.
Jason, can you tell us a bit about getting AMD pretty much everywhere, with all these partnerships?
You hit the nail on the head, a lot of great partnerships with this keynote, a lot of great partnerships leading to these products, I mean.
Our products are really nothing without having those great partners to bring, bring a full solution around, what we’re bringing from a product perspective.
So you saw the partnership with HP, Lenovo.
You saw the The Mercedes partnership with Louis and Toto in their ILM.
We talked about all those partnerships.
Microsoft of course, Panos driving so much innovation in the PC space as well as what we’re partnering on the on the Xbox side of the house.
Stepping up that level of game console performance.
So a lot of great partnership is has come into play.
And, you know, in addition to those partners, a lot of OEMs have have worked with us on this on this rising 5000.
You saw that we were releasing about a 50% increase in notebooks this year with our partners.
To X the number of gaming notebooks year on year compared to rising 4000 series.
It’s a great partnership across the board.
That’s really what it takes and building those relationships is fundamental to what we do.
Again, those, they make our products great we make their products great and that’s, that’s that’s what that’s what AMD is about.
With all these partners that you may have, God, sorry, is Thank you.
With all the partnerships you have.
They all seem to have very different needs.
You are talking about climate, looking at climate change and actually modeling that stuff.
You are talking about wind tunnels for these cars.
You talk about high performance gaming.
How is AMD staying focused when it comes to Meeting all the demands of all these various companies.
Our goal remains to solve big problems.
Whether that’s climate change or what you heard Lisa talk about with Covid-19, everything we’re doing on that effort.
And we want to solve the big problems, and that does require focus.
We have to be choosy, we have to select What we want to do but I think you heard it well in the you know in the in the partnership segments, more computing more compute capability is always needed.
That’s always an ask out there from scientists from developers.
You know from you know, meteorologists.
No matter who is solving a problem more compute makes that happen faster.
Solves the more complex problems and so we’re in we’re always aimed at, you know, giving that capability to those to those audiences and working with them hand in hand to understand their problems.
So we do have to be a little choosy and what problems we solve, but again, we’re trying to solve those big problems.
And making sure that whether it’s Verizon, Radeon, Epic we offer the resources to those folks to solve those big problems.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
That’s awesome, so one of the partnerships that you mentioned I’m hoping that your may be able to go in a little more depth and speak to this one particular partnership is ILM and AMD are working together.
I know that if as I as I have talked about earlier today, if Anybody who’s watched the Mandalorian knows that most of that show is shot in a large scale LED set called the volume.
And I’m really curious how AMD, how that partnership came to be and also, what plans are you able to share with us about that partnership
So the ILM partnership, and I’ll try to avoid any Mandalorian spoilers during my response.
The ILM partnership, that is absolutely, I think it’s a great example of what we’re doing with our partners.
You look at the heritage of a development house like ILM Obviously the Star Wars heritage is phenomenal.
We partnered with that team to deliver both our epic solutions, our threadripper solutions on the workstation side whether it’s on the server side workstations
Being able to render and develop, richer experiences, richer visuals being not being able to tell the difference between visual effects and reality is what we’re looking to enable, Able then to do for their audiences.
So it’s really a great Testament to what we’re enabled, able to enable with that compute.
And you’re talking about the volume.
First of all, I want one of those things in my backyard, that’s just, that’s about the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.
But being able to enable something that just.
You even for the actors, involved in the production, the blending of visual virtual and unreal.
It just, it makes it that much more immersive for somebody who’s tuning into the Mandalorian and you know You know, trying to take in that experience and really getting really getting sucked into, you know, sucked into the story.
Yeah, yeah that that makes a lot of sense i there was a clip in particular on the the making of where they said we need to
To adjust the point of light where this the sun would be coming from or a star would be coming from, and there’s someone with, they’ve got their computer right there and they just go boop boop boop and then all of a sudden the entire it looks like the entire Time of day just changes in the in the in the set in the volume and it’s just amazing.
You want to add a mountain in the background like.
So.
Sadly it’s it’s such an amazing testament to the power of computing that companies like AMD are providing to the entertainment industry.
And I really applaud you guys for pushing into that space because, you know, obviously, tech and the entertainment industry really go hand in hand a lot of times.
Absolutely.
And I think that that partnership is going to keep growing and it’s.
Those visuals become more and more important in that in that industry, we are going to be there to deliver best in class solutions.
Using phone questions Did you not do that?
Speaking of pushing into spaces I am really curious because AMD is doing some great work they are getting their ryzen 5000 you guys are getting your rising 5000 in ultra thin PCs.
Which requires a bit of engineering any idea if and when AMD will end up powering a smartphone of some kind smaller devices and these ultra thins because I’m sure people might really love the idea of a ryzen powered phone.
Yeah, it’s a very it’s a very compelling idea you saw Lisa, announced with the rising 5000 mobile and notebooks 17 and a half hours of general usage playback, 21 hours of video playback.
We are delivering high performance, low power solutions that are truly efficient, built on our seven nanometer tech.
Being able to offer that, shows that we can go into that low power space.
Allow people to work longer play longer, you know can consume content longer so we you know we have a we have a great push in that space.
You know the handset market it’s it’s not really our focus at this time.
As you can see we’re aggressively going after the high performance space and server PC workstation performance graphics.
Those efforts require a ton of focus.
They require a ton of focus to develop the solution, but also to get it right with our partners really at the experience level.
And companies that get to split on their focus get too divided, they run into issues.
So right now we’re staying focused in that in that high performance space.
Low power core is low power graphics.
It’s definitely in our wheelhouse it’s something we can do.
But we wanna build it right.
We wanna stay focused right now, upping the ante, upping the bar and the high-performance solution space is really our focus right now, making those customers those end-users even happier.
We want to stay there for now and, who knows what the future holds?>>Okay, so you mentioned the word efforts.
And I have one more question for you.
And I think it’s one that a lot of people are asking.
Speaking of effort, I have been trying very hard to get my hands on A very nice radio graphics card and I cannot do it, my friend I cannot do it.
Can you talk a little bit to the challenges?
AMD and the rest of the industry I’m sure has faced Bringing these things to market.
I know there has been a very strong demand for new graphics cards across the board in 2020, and how AMD maybe plans to tackle that or what the plans are to sort of up that inventory so that people can start really getting their hands on some of the products that you guys are making right now.
Yeah, so it’s a great question.
It’s a question I’ve definitely received a few times.
So it is, as you pointed out, it is industry wide.
There’s been a dramatic increase in demand and some of that related to the COVID and You know, some of that relates to the supply chain issues that resulted as part of COVID you know, worldwide industry wide.
You know, first of all clarify that our manufacturing capability of shipping products has never been more robust.
Our fab partnerships component partnerships are very healthy.
We’re killing our products while in production.
But COVID-19 is resulted in a clear unarguable increase in PC demand, graphics demand CPU demand and pretty much every market analysis source has increased their forecasts their actuals for 2020.
Their forecasts for 2021 And we’ve worked to bring additional capacity online to address these needs.
But to your point, it is very much industry wide, many components across the entire spectrum, are facing this challenge.
So you know supply problems, no.
Unexpected demand, yes.
But we are, for folks that are wanting to get their hands on graphics card, a new CPU.
First of all, we say thank you for being an AMD fan.
And going out there and looking for our products, whether it’s CPU graphics card or a new console.
And we’re doing everything in our power to increase our output, increase our capacity to address that.
So it’s, you know, we know a lot of folks are out there dying to get an upgrade.
You know, they want a new CPU want a new graphics card, and the AMD team.
You know I spend a lot of time on this every day.
I know, the full, team spends a lot of time on this, making sure that this is a priority.
We can address this and we get more of these, you know more of this great technology in people’s hands.
Makes sense i’ll try to be patient.
I just really want to get my hands on some new new computer I got I got a new computer this year, I’m gonna go crazy.
I want I want a lot of people in 2021 to build new PCs.
So a little more patience, please and and we’ll we’ll come through.