India Today Gaming: 1v1 with Frank Azor, Chief Architect of Gaming Solutions, AMD

We are back with a new episode of our interview series 1v1 with India Today Gaming. This time, we virtually sat down with a prominent personality from the PC gaming industry, Frank Azor. Azor is the Chief Architect of Gaming Solutions at AMD and in the past, he has worked at Alienware and Dell. During the one-hour-long interview, we discussed a wide variety of topics from the situation in 2020 to new technology in 2021. Frank also outlined the likely gaming trends that we may see in the space towards the end of the year.

AMD Radeon 6000 series and Ryzen 5000 series stocks, the future

Besides, we also addressed the elephant in the room around the availability of the AMD Radeon 6000 series GPUs and the Ryzen 5000 series GPUs. Frank went into a comprehensive explanation around the effort it takes to develop and manufacture CPUs and GPUs. During the conversation, he also went ahead to wink at the future technologies that AMD is working on. This includes the recently announced RDNA2-based Radeon GPUs for laptops that will likely hit the market in the coming months.

Talking about the future, Frank went back to the processor and GPU technology roadmaps that the company showcased during the past launches. He also addressed his past comments around the likely robust supply right before the 2020 Radeon launch. Though he stopped before offering statements around the stock in absolutes, he did mention that the company is trying its best to make things as fast as possible.

APUs, RDNA 2, Radeon Super Sampling, and more

As part of the interaction, we also spoke about things that one can expect on the APU front. Just hours after the interview, AMD launched its latest Ryzen 5000 series APU for its OEM partners in the market. It also re-affirmed that the new APUs will be available through retail channels sometime later this year. This is much better than the last-gen Ryzen 4000 series APUs that were only available through unofficial OEM-only channels.

Besides, Frank also shared some information about the much-anticipated AMD Radeon Super Sampling. He did note that the technology will be “worth the wait” with more robust support than the competition. The conversation proceeded to discuss how AMD and its competition market their products in the market.

Smart Access Memory, eSports industry and work with the Indian gaming community

In the final leg of the interview, we talked about how Smart Access Memory helped users get more performance from existing hardware. This includes the optimizations that the company has done to achieve this performance. Frank also outlined the work AMD is doing with the eSports industry through close partnerships and feedback for future development. Finally, he also outlined how the company plans on engaging with the gaming community in India. This topic focused more on the work that AMD is doing on the global stage beside the universal issue of availability.