A few days ago, we reported on AMD's newest expansion plans for Serbia. The company opened two new engineering design centers with offices in Belgrade and Nis. We were invited to join the opening ceremony and got an exclusive interview with one of AMD's top executives, Andrej Zdravkovic, who is the senior vice president and Chief Software Officer. Previously, we reported on AMD's transition to become a software company. The company has recently tripled its software engineering workforce and is moving some of its best people to support these teams. AMD's plan is spread over a three to five-year timeframe to improve its software ecosystem, accelerating hardware development to launch new products more frequently and to react to changes in software demand. AMD found that to help these expansion efforts, opening new design centers in Serbia would be very advantageous.

We sat down with Andrej Zdravkovic to discuss the purpose of AMD's establishment in Serbia and the future of some products. Zdravkovic is actually an engineer from Serbia, where he completed his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in electrical engineering from Belgrade University. In 1998, Zdravkovic joined ATI and quickly rose through the ranks, eventually becoming a senior director. During his decade-long tenure, Zdravkovic witnessed a significant industry shift as AMD acquired ATI in 2006. After a brief stint at another company, Zdravkovic returned to AMD in 2015, bringing with him a wealth of experience and a unique perspective on the evolution of the graphics and computing industry.Here is the full interview:

If there's one thing enthusiasts usually complain regarding SSDs is that here doesn't seem to exist any viable alternatives to a good old high-capacity platter-based drives. Where are my 2 TB SSDs for 200$? How can I possibly save my entire music library in this puny 512 GB SSD that has already cost me my arms and legs?

Well, those answers might not be coming anytime soon (even though the advent of QLC NAND might change that.) In the meantime, we can put our eyes on Viking Technology, so as to see that a halo SSD product can achieve amazing storage capacity in a standard form factor. The company has just started selling their UHC (Ultra High Capacity) Silo Series, which leverage SK Hynix's MLC NAND (if the capacity doesn't put your $ klaxons running, the use of MLC should.) The SSDs leverage a 6 GB/s SAS interface, and deliver 500 MB/s read and 350 MB/s write speeds. The manufacturer says these can sustain up to 60,000 IOPS on random reads, and 15,000 IOPS on random writes. These may sound low in high-performance terms (and they sort of are), but remember these are products geared for the enterprise market. Pricing wasn't (maybe smartly) disclosed. I believe I'd laugh maniacally should I know how much they cost. However, if you must have a high-capacity SSD, you know where to look for.