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 second half 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.

Q: Describe your official responsibilities at AMD

A: At the high level, it’s managing the decision-making around what technology we will be using and developing at AMD. That includes longer term R&D considerations, as well as new directions and specific innovations we’ll be incorporating into the product line. On top of that, I’m responsible for managing all of AMD’s IP development – core processors for all market segments and associated IP such as analog, I/Os, accelerators and memory.

Chekib Akrout

Q: What are the greatest challenges facing the semiconductor industry?

A: We’re in a very different place in the industry today. We came out of a high growth rate environment – everyone was growing and could bring out new technologies and try to reach new market segments. Now things are much slower for everyone because of the global economy. However, the opportunity for innovation is still very much alive. My view is, that even in a downturn, you’ll see big winners emerge with new products and breakthrough ideas. As adding MHz becomes more and more challenging, we are being forced to look at things differently and that’s where innovation will arise. Power consumption is a barrier and we face lithography challenges in continuing to shrink dimensions. How can we leverage multi-core and GPU integration to overcome power limitations? How do we bring more performance to the entire system / motherboard to continue to deliver value? Those are questions we face.

Q: Technology standards (like networking, Blu-ray, etc.) are good for the consumer, but they have the potential to constrain innovation. How does standardization impact innovation?

A: Standardization doesn’t have to inhibit innovation. In some cases, perhaps it might slow it down slightly, but ultimately it benefits our customers and the consumers who use the products. As long as standards bodies maintain a robust exchange of ideas, innovation will rise to the top. Sometimes you might lose because you are very small and the other guy is very big, but usually the best overall solution wins, so that’s a good thing. If we all went our own way, the overall market for technology would likely be much smaller and we’d risk zero interoperability between equipment. It’s not feasible to go forward without standards; you just have to do it in a way that fosters new ideas too.

Q: What are the greatest opportunities for technology to benefit the global community today?

A: I predict that you will see more user friendly, more capable computers that are portable and more integrated into our lives. You can already see it starting today; computers and mobile devices being used to watch TV or people spending more time on the Web with networked PCs in the home. New online apps will just continue that trend and obviously the current generation has already picked it up and run with it. If you look back at the last 15 years, it’s truly amazing how far we have come. We’ve gone from DOS to Windows to portable machines with high resolution playback and networked gaming in a very short timeframe. I can’t think of any other industry that has had as large an impact in as short a time. When you give people access to that capability in an easy to use, affordable form factor you can really make the world smaller, and maybe increase our understanding of our differences and recognize our similarities. That’s powerful stuff.

Chekib Akrout

Q: What are the biggest changes in industry since you began your career?

A: I’ve seen many changes. The level of integration, for example; I still remember 20 years ago when we talked about where industry was going and how we weren’t going to be able to push the physics of CMOS anymore. Then in ‘90s we broke that barrier and clock-speed became the obsession. Then it was power – today everything has to be lower power. Also, I’m amazed by where we’re going with the systems and the notion of distributed computing. I see an explosion of consumers capable of tapping into massive computing resources through the Cloud. Consumers will have thinner clients that don’t do as much computing, but rely on what is in the data center to do it for them, which gets back to the power question. You give the end-user a much more valuable tool by pushing the battery life equation into the background while raising the stakes in the data center. These are all interrelated changes we are dealing with on a daily basis.

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. 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.