AMD strives to be a great partner to Dell Technologies

Keeping up with that rate of change and pace of change requires a level of investment from a technology provider like AMD to make sure that we're always ahead of the curve, says Rahul Tikoo, Senior Vice President & GM, Client Business Unit at AMD.

At Dell Tech World 2025, Dell announced advancements to the Dell AI Factory as it continues to see demand since its debut a year ago. Part of the success of the Dell AI Factory is the many partnerships that continue to enable it.

This includes an ongoing partnership with AMD. Both Dell and AMD have been collaborating on various segments in the industry. Some of the updates announced at DTW include advancements to the Dell AI Platform with AMD. The update will see 200G of storage networking added and an upgraded AMD ROC open software stack for organizations to simplify workflows, support LLMs and efficiently manage complex workloads.

Dell and AMD are also collaborating to provide Day 0 support and performance optimized containers for AI models such as Llama 4. Apart from that, Dell PowerEdge XE9785 and XE9785L servers will support AMD Instinct MI350 series GPUs, which offer 288 GB of HBM3E memory per GPU and deliver up to 35 times greater inferencing performance.

On the PC side, new Dell Pro devices will be running on the Ryzen AI PRO processors. The announcement was made at CES 2025 in January and continues to gain momentum among customers.

In an interview with CRN Asia, Rahul Tikoo (pictured below), Senior Vice President & GM, Client Business Unit at AMD shares updates on the expanded AMD and Dell partnership, especially on how AMD is growing its commercial PC portfolio with Dell.

Can you tell us a bit more about AMD’s partnership with Dell Technologies.

We've had a great partnership with Dell for many years now, starting with the enterprise server business and also the consumer business. As we launched our last generation of product, Strix Point (AMD Ryzen AI 300) in June last year, we started working on our partnership with commercial PCs. And so announced at CES and then in market in March, 10 commercial PCs across a broad spectrum of form factors.

It's a very broad portfolio of commercial PCs that covers the market very well. And so, we were very excited about it. Dell, of course, is a leader in commercial PCs and being able to win them as a partner and a customer opens up many doors for us in the commercial enterprise space.

We're in the market with HP, Lenovo, Asus, Acer, and many other OEMs. We have had great partnerships with all of them for many years and are doing very well as a business. I think if you look at commercial PC space, Dell is a leader in that space. And so being able to partner with them in commercial PCs helps us unlock a large part of the market that we didn't have access to before.

From a pure market perspective, that's great for us. But we also worked very closely over the course of the last seven to eight months with Dell to bring this portfolio of products to market. There was strong engineering collaboration, CTO collaboration, working hand in hand with hundreds of engineers at AMD working with Dell on these products. And these were brought to market at a pretty fast speed for product development. Typically, these things can take years, and we were able to achieve that in seven or eight months.

How important is collaboration in developing AI PCs?

When I look at our priorities in the PC business at AMD, the number one and most important thing is that we want to win in commercial PCs. Number two and equally important, we want to win in AI PCs.

Those two are sort of coming. AMD has been investing in the AI PC space for a couple of generations now. In 2022, we launched our first 16 TOPS, Phoenix Point. Last year, we launched Strix Point, which is our 50 TOPS AI PC. And then in January, we launched Kraken Point, which expands its price point. After that, we launched Strix Halo, which is just another level of compute capability in an AI PC.

We've been investing ahead of the demand for AI PCs with the understanding that technology is sort of foundational to people developing the software experiences to make it useful for end customers.

We've also been working very closely with the ecosystem. We work with over 150 different ISVs, initially working with Microsoft and Copilot Plus experiences that have come out now, but then also working with a wide plethora of ISVs. And the initial work with ISVs was very manual. We had to go tune custom models on a very manual basis to be able to get the performance out of the ISV applications.

But in March this year, we launched our software development kit (SDK). The aim of that SDK was to make ISV software development much easier. And how we did that was many of the foundational models; they're sort of built into that SDK kit.

So, if an ISV is using a standard foundational model, then they can just use the SDK, and they don't need to do any more tuning beyond the SDK. Their ISV application will be performed on an AMD NPU. And so that's a large percentage of the ISVs that aren't really doing full custom model development, especially the smaller ISVs.

We're seeing acceleration as a result of that in the software ecosystem and use cases that ISVs are developing. There have been some really great, interesting use cases that have come out.

What is the biggest challenge right now?

I think the biggest challenges in AI are how, by leaps and bounds, is that the technology and the compute infrastructure are growing. The need for compute is just insatiable. The kind of use cases that we're seeing are changing on a daily basis; it is just at an unprecedented pace.

Keeping up with that rate of change and pace of change requires a level of investment from a technology provider like AMD to make sure that we're always ahead of the curve.

What are customers and partners hoping to get more from you?

I think our customers, especially in PC space, want the best technology, and they want the best ECU. If you look at what’s happening in the PC space, there's a lot of demand from our customers for investments. If they don’t invest, they’re going to be left behind and they can’t afford to do that.

But in that fixed CapEx environment, how do they invest appropriately in the right end user technology? So, what they're looking for is the best TCO. Who has the best performance that can convert into TCO, so they spend less money overall in their install base?

We are known in the industry for multitasking performance. We have decided that we're going to be leaders in multitasking, multi-threaded capabilities. In measurements against the competition, we see 2x plus performance over the competition in multi-threaded tasks. As a result, what that means to a corporation is they are getting tasks done faster by utilizing their PC and getting a higher return on investment.

So that's one area that we shine in. The other area we shine in is our NPU is going to be always the best in the industry. We have 50 tops NPU and it's the highest tops. What that equates to is the most compute power which equates to performance. In NPU, performance will be the best. So as a result, what you'll find is if you look at AI scores in general, we'll be much better than the competition.

When you have an AI-optimized application that's using the NPU, we'll outperform the competition significantly. We actually demonstrated that here by running side-by-side against Intel. And that video was really that when you run us versus the company, we got done 7 minutes ahead of the competition. That's one task a day. You multiply that by 8 hours; that's a lot of time. So, I think that's where the enterprises see value in us, and that's the conversation we're having with them.

We're not having a conversation about “my PC is better than the other PC”. We're having a TCO conversation. Our conversation is all centered around saving customers money so that they can invest in their priorities across modernizing their infrastructure, their software or data.

Where do you see the future headed for AMD?

If you look at just the endpoint side, we've always had strong momentum in the gaming business. We're leaders in the gaming industry. We continue to be leaders in that space. We want to maintain that.

But at the same time, there's two priorities we have. Commercial PC growth and becoming leaders in commercial PC as well as AI PC growth, becoming leaders in AI PC.

I want to be able to serve our customers in at least half the market. With our technology and the advantage, we have in our technology, we should be able to do that. Why would a customer not be willing to bet on AMD if they're getting better TCO, better technology at the end? There's no reason for that.

My hope and strategy are to work with our end customers with OEMs like Dell and show them the value proposition so they can bet on us. That's what we want to do in the end.

This is where your partner ecosystem comes in to carry that message for AMD, right?

Absolutely. We are working very closely with our channel partners as they're a big route to market for all of our OEM businesses.

A lot of end customers don't know what they don't know, which is where a partner network can be such a strong advisor to them, right?

What is my problem? How do I go about solving that problem? Who are the right partners I should work with? For example, a customer might be a healthcare company working with a healthcare channel ecosystem. Or they could be a traditional enterprise that has a GSI network and system integrators that work with them.

So, we want to work with all of them and make sure we enable them to be trusted advisors to our joint end customers. Because I mean, we can't reach everyone directly, right? So that's where the partner network is very important.

Lastly, what else is AMD hoping to see from Dell in the partnership going forward?

Dell has been a great partner in the enterprise space. Dell has been a great partner in the consumer space. We are focused on winning commercial enterprise client PCs with Dell. That's really the focus.

So, working together in calling on enterprises, sharing with them the right value proposition, and how AMD can help them sort of unlock value in their enterprise. That's where Dell can help because they have direct relationships.

We can be a great partner to t, and they can be a great partner to us in unlocking that value.