The AMD CEO, Lisa Su, illustrated the reply of the company in an emergency COVID-19. AMD has announced the creation of a background called "COVID-19 HPC"to provide research institutions with the computing resources they need to accelerate medical research on the new Coronavirus and other diseases.
The fund will initially include one $ 15 million worth of HPC systems powered by EPYC CPU and Radeon Instinct GPU to major research institutes. The company has also joined the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, the effort launched by the White House, the U.S. Department of Energy and IBM to give researchers access to some of the world's most powerful supercomputers.
"AMD is contributing technology and technical resources, including Radeon Instinct MI50 accelerators and support resources for the Corona system hosted at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. These resources are almost doubling the maximum system performance, providing additional computing power for the molecular modeling to support research against COVID-19, "explains Lisa Su.
The US company is also committed to supporting communities around the world. AMD has also allocated more than $ 1 million in initiatives charities and supporting foundations such as the Chinese Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders in Europe, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation and the Austin Community Foundation in the United States and other local foundations in Canada, India, Malaysia and Singapore.
AMD also has donated hundreds of thousands of masks to medical staff and has allocated an additional million dollars to double the donations made by its employees. The company has even given up priority to the deliveries of its processors for the embedded sector, used in fans and respirators.
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The CEO also reiterated that at the moment the production of the products has suffered only a slight backlash and that the priority remains the health and safety of its employees, partners and customers. For this reason, most AMD employees around the world are working from home.
"We continue to pay our employees hourly wages, whether or not they are able to perform their duties during this period," said Lisa Su adding that the company has increased the health benefits associated with COVID-19 and that the temperature controls at the entrance were strengthened in the offices, together with the implementation of "strict social removal procedures and the adoption of different shifts to reduce density".