AMD stays ahead with trends starting in Japan | Print |

December 2005 -- AMD is a $5.0 billion designer and producer of microprocessors and Flash memory devices and views its Japan operations as key to its product development and product planning.  Its Flash memory joint venture with global powerhouse Fujitsu and its Japan Engineering Lab (JEL) serve to capture the technology trends starting in Japan and bring them to the global marketplace.  The company sees Japan as the leader of global trends in mobile computing and intends to penetrate its enterprise computing market valued as the second largest in the world.

Established in 1976, AMD Japan has historically been involved in the Flash memory business, enjoying a long relationship with Fujitsu that helped the company establish a flash memory manufacturing site in Japan.  In 2003, AMD Japan and Fujitsu formed the joint venture Spansion to focus exclusively on developing, manufacturing, and marketing Flash memory.  As a result, AMD was able to develop and introduce MirrorBit technology, which allows users to have both high-speed access and high-density features.

More recently, the company has placed more focus on their microprocessor developments.  Engineers at AMD Japan continue to make progress in developing processing capabilities at ever decreasing power and are also looking for ways to enable processors to quickly attain zero-power states when needed and to have dynamic power reduction capabilities. 

These engineers work out of AMD’s JEL established in 2004.  Because AMD views Japan as the country where global mobile computing trends are set, engineers at JEL allow these trends to drive their product definition.  “Japan is really the bell weather marketplace for us to learn the mobile space to get tapped into what we have to be doing in the future,” said Scott Swanstrom, director of AMD’s MSS Platform Architecture Group. 

To fully integrate the world’s foremost technology trends coming from Japan, Swanstrom places his key architects where these trends originate.  "We put our key folks on the ground in Japan to learn the market, learn the requirements, and bring them back into our normal factory processes."

Swanstrom’s team derives many of these trends from Japan’s PC market, which has driven global mobile computing trends for several years.  Consumer demand is dominated by notebooks and other mobile computing solutions, prompting constant product improvement and development.  Notebooks have been outselling desktop units in Japan since 2001 and comprised nearly 55 percent of the total PC market in 2003.  “The way we view the Japanese PC industry,” said Mr. Swanstrom, “is that the market is very much driving those types of technologies, devices, and user profiles that the rest of the world will adopt over time.” 

Looking forward, AMD Japan says its main focus now is to penetrate Japan’s enterprise computing market, which is the second largest in the world after that of the United States.  Whether in Flash memory or microprocessors in either the mobile or enterprise computing markets, AMD values its operations in Japan as vital to maintaining an advantage over its competition.