As AMD increases its market share and revenues, so does its research and development budget. AMD’s CPU division is expanding. And it’s not just new hires. It’s building a new research and development facility in Poughkeepsie, New York.
A list of open positions on AMD’s website (via Tom's Hardware and @mikeev) shows that the company is looking for some serious talent. There are 25 open engineering positions, and most of them are based in Poughkeepsie. The positions include CPU core, performance and verification engineers. These aren’t the kinds of skills that you learn in high school, and they represent a significant financial investment by AMD.
The news will also please the United States government, as it seeks to boost domestic chip manufacturing capacity. AMD could have established the new facility in Asia for cheaper. That alone is a sign that AMD’s finances are in a healthy state.
According to AMD’s financial reports, its net revenues increased by a massive 70% from March to 2021 to 2022, with net income rising over 41%. That means AMD has the cash to splash.
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How long until we see the fruits of this new hiring spree? Honestly, it will be years. Zen 4 is getting ready to release, Zen 5 work will be well advanced if it’s to launch in 2023-2024. That means products featuring design input from the new facility are likely to debut in 2025 at the earliest, though the verification engineers will have plenty to do in the meantime.
It’s a far cry from AMD’s doldrum days in the early 2010’s. At that time, it was a potential takeover target when its share price went under $2.00. As Ryzen and EPYC products took market share, so did the growth of the company. It’s good to see that after shareholder dividends are paid out, there’s enough left over to significantly boost R&D spending. Healthy competition is good for the consumer and it forces Intel to remain aggressive to prevent AMD from making further inroads into its lucrative CPU businesses.
