Since you are not in college, it’s good to work on your portfolio, certificates or even participating in coding challenges/contests.

If you don’t have any of these, then the chances are pretty low.

what makes you stand out over the hundreds of MIT, Caltech, Stanford kids vying for the same position?

I’d recommend you look for a contract position. If you’re only available for a certain window of time, you can let them know because there are occasional short-term needs, or a case where there is only a limited amount of time left in a contract.

Hi, I’m a former intern and current employee at AMD.

I interned remotely from the Austin location. My interview to get in was fairly straightforward, though I did meet a recruiter first at a career fair at my university.

I programmed with C++, Verilog, and Python to generate stimulus for test chips (chips that weren’t for production but rather to test the capabilities of the silicon).

Your list of skills you intend to learn just seem like a laundry list of various things you’ve vaguely heard of without considering their uses and strengths, or how AMD might use them internally (if at all).

Especially since you are not going to college, recruiters will usually prioritize college students first. You need to set yourself apart. It’s not the amount of different things you “know”, but the quality of the knowledge. Focus on a few specific things you’re interested in, and make projects related to that.

I can only really speak on the hardware side of our products. It’s a lot of low level or high performance code, so you will probably want to get really good at C or C++ and get yourself an embedded dev kit. That way you can practice with real world low level programming and have something visual to show for it. Maybe try dabbling in game dev or osdev.

We also do the chip designs in Verilog. This is a hard skill to learn outside of college, but you can try learning it. Maybe start with the Nand2Tetris tutorial. Get an FPGA dev kit for this.

Internally we use a lot of Python and Ruby for scripting and automation, it would be beneficial to at least be comfortable with one language like this.

Most of the hardware teams develop on Linux, whereas most of the software teams I know develop on Windows. This is a skill you can probably just learn on the job. Just get good with a terminal, doesn’t matter the OS. The skills will transfer over.

I don’t think certificates really matter, and I haven’t heard of C# being used here but I can’t be sure of that. I know the yield analysis team uses Java though that’s the only one I’ve heard of that does.

Hopefully this helps. Best of luck to your journey. Remember, quality over quantity.

Not being a college student and not having any degree or official accredited education is going to basically disqualify you entirely.

No seriously, the industry is already chock full of people who heard tech was the new honeypot, and PLENTY of people who have actual educations and degrees.

If you aren’t willing to put in the effort to stand above the competition in the slightest, why should AMD ever consider you?

I really reccomend the Prefer Frequency in BIOS and using process lasso. The game bar works sometimes but it sometimes doesn’t and it’s really easy to set and forget with process lasso. This method basically ensures everything will be put on the frequency die (background, browser, productivity apps, whatever) and you manually put games on the Cache cores which is more intuitive than hoping the game bar works imo.

There’s only one thing that doesn’t get mentioned often and I think it’s a bug. When you use PBO, CPU affinity seems to stop working correctly kind of annoying but you’re not missing much from PBO on these chips anyways.

Nobody:

OP: yes I can work multiple internships back to back