I recently sat down with Chekib Akrout, co-leader of AMD’s Central Engineering organization, to hear his insights into the future of computing, AMD’s engineering teams and the industry.  The following is the first of a two-part blog posting that captures our conversation.  Chekib joined AMD in June, 2008; he previously held senior positions at Freescale Semiconductor and IBM.

Gary:

You joined the company almost a year ago.  What drew you to AMD?

Chekib:

I was drawn by the challenge of bringing together AMD’s intellectual property and obvious engineering talent in innovative ways.  That’s what is at the core of an engineer, right?  Solving problems and creating new things is both art and science, and I’m drawn to the tension between those two perspectives.  I’m also a big believer in process and how you apply the talents of many different people and skills sets to execute very complex projects.   Can you consistently execute in a very systematic way?  That’s what I came here to help achieve.

Gary:

What are some of the execution challenges that face chip engineering teams?

Chekib:

There are two primary issues you have to consider when you first walk in the door at a chip company:  What are the tools being used to do the engineering and what is the mindset of the people using them?  What is the priority – features or schedule? And how is that balance being managed?  Those are the questions at the heart of what I do every day.  When I first joined, the challenges with our first native quad-core product, codenamed “Barcelona”, had really woken everyone up to the idea that our processes were not perfect and needed to be fixed.  We’ve spent a lot of time since then to address both the tools and the culture to make sure we can execute, and that paid off tremendously with our first 45-nm product, codenamed “Shanghai“.

Gary:     What keeps you up at night?

Chekib:

A big one is how we will wisely use all the transistors we are going to have at our disposal at the advanced process nodes.  The processor cores will be very small – so do we use a lot of them or only a few, along with a GPU or two?  These kinds of system partitioning questions result in a variety of thought provoking scenarios, and the physical limits of the manufacturing technology will have a large impact of the power consumption and performance budgets.  The second is getting AMD’s next processor core generations, codenamed “Bulldozer” and “Bobcat”, built and delivered on time with the right performance to compete.

Gary:

How is AMD’s integrated CPU / GPU product, Llano, looking?

Chekib:

We are quite happy with what we are seeing so far and believe that “Llano” is really going to demonstrate the power of AMD’s two strengths:  x86 CPUs and GPUs.  The current schedule is for 2011 introduction so it is still early, but because we are using an existing CPU core for the first product and not making big changes in the memory structure right away, we feel quite confident about where we are with Llano.  We are doing the smart thing by taking an iterative step as we begin to tackle some of the more interesting optimizations possible with the two different types of cores.

Gary:

What excites you about the current competitive environment?

Chekib:

The leading edge chip manufacturing and design technologies available today and an abundance of high quality people available to innovate with it. That is a very rare combination in the industry. We all have strengths and weaknesses.  The trick is identifying and exploiting your strengths against the weaknesses of others in the markets where you play.

Gary:

What role does engineering play in aligning technology’s potential with business realities?

Chekib:

We develop the vision/direction on where technology is going and make sure that vision is in sync with the company’s mission and strengths. In our industry today there are a lot of competition and dynamics in the market, so the right strategy is not always obvious.  We have chief technology officers in the business units that specifically address the needs of that space and their customers. Personally, I also have a role inside the company to help promote the technical community and foster innovation.  Radical technology developments are still possible even though the industry is more mature now, so we have to keep our eyes open for those in the business too.

Chekib Akrout is Corporate Vice President, Central Engineering, at AMD. As co-leader of AMD’s Central Engineering group, Chekib has direct responsibility for AMD’s Accelerated Computing efforts, Research and Advanced Development Labs (RADL), processor cores and foundational IP, CAD and layout teams. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

Gary Silcott is a Product PR manager at AMD supporting ATI Stream technology and AMD Central Engineering. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.