Come 2013, AMD will start to leverage the efforts of the chip maker's Advanced Architecture and Technology Lab (AATL) in its processor and chipset products. AMD announced the foundation of the forward-looking technology team yesterday, locating it in Redmond, Washington - the home of a certain software giant...

The AATL's mission is to determine which technologies will drive AMD's products "beyond the five-year time horizon", part of the company's plan to build it's operation into one to match arch-rival Intel's.

The AATL will be run by AMD's chief architectural officer, Rich Witek, who's been with the company since 2002 but has more than 26 years' experience in the semiconductor business beyond that. He holds 22 patents, AMD said, and has been involved in the development of the ARM, PowerPC and Alpha processors.

AMD didn't say how many engineers and researchers Witek has working for him, so we guess he's on his own an an office with plenty paper napkins and envelope-backs to sketch things on for the time being. Eventually, AMD want 30-40 people working in the AATL, though it didn't provide a timescale as to when this will happen - or, indeed, when it will open the other AATLs it foresees being founded in other parts of the world. ®