The pandemic has changed how we use technology to live, work, play and communicate. The PC market has never been this strong, with demand for laptops being driven by working professionals, students, and gamers, stresses Vinay Sinha, managing director, Sales, AMD India. As per IDC, the Indian PC market, which consists of desktops, notebooks, and workstations, saw shipment growth of 44.5% y-o-y in 2021. During the first wave of the pandemic, the demand for laptops arose from the need to move from “one PC per home” to “one PC per person”. The second wave of the pandemic saw demand accelerating as organisations and consumers were compelled to adapt to remote work, online education, and other day-to-day requirements.

“These trends have continued in 2022,” says the AMD India MD. “Buyers are also becoming more discerning as they seek premium designs in different form factors for work, learning and gaming.” With a booming gaming ecosystem and competitive esports tournaments on the rise, the demand for gaming laptops among students and young working professionals has increased. Sinha says that consumers are seeking high performance laptops which can fulfill their needs on the go.

“Last year, we witnessed exponential growth in demand for gaming laptops that are sleek in design and offer desktop-like performance for gaming and other intensive workloads. In fact, globally, AMD’s computing and graphics segment grew 32% y-o-y to $2.6 bn, driven by growth in both Ryzen and Radeon processor sales. We also saw record double-digit y-o-y growth in our client computing revenues, led by notebook sales,” says Sinha.

Closer home, the AMD India head says remote work, hybrid work models, online education, gaming, and entertainment will continue to boost demand for PCs and laptops. Content creation and content consumption will also continue to increase. “We expect to see the trend growing as we go forward, as content creation and streaming are one of the ways gamers can have human interaction while being at home. As the gaming ecosystem grows further and with competitive esports tournaments on the rise, the gaming laptop segment is going to be an exciting space, with technology advancements and innovations giving end consumers a plethora of designs to choose from,” he adds.

Given the demand and changing consumer behaviour, AMD is focussing on premium designs with OEMs across ultrathin and premium gaming categories. At CES 2022, AMD announced the Ryzen 6000 series processors for laptops, bringing the new, highly efficient and extremely powerful, “Zen 3+” core architecture together with the all-new AMD RDNA 2 architecture based on chip graphics, Sinha says, adding, “we are transforming the laptop market, offering consumers a lot more capability with our ultrathin and gaming laptops.”

During the course of this year, AMD India plans to boost sales in the premium segment via e-commerce. “AMD is constantly innovating, and in a competitive landscape this is both necessary and expected by our partners and customers. With the launch of Zen 3 and AMD RDNA 2 architectures last year, we continue to deliver cutting-edge compute performance across desktops, notebooks, and servers,” he says.