Bengaluru, Oct 8 (IANS): Karnataka Minister for Large and Medium Industries and Infrastructure Development, M.B. Patil, on Saturday had a 'productive discussion' in San Francisco, California, around skilling, Center of Excellence, and stimulating of start-up ecosystem with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) for the state, an official said.

Discussions held with officials of the Santa Clara-headquartered firm Jay Hiremath, Senior Vice-President, AMD, Soni Jiandani -- Co-founder of Pensando Systems (AMD Networking Technology and Solutions Group) -- centred around various partnership opportunities, an official statement said.

M. B. Patil is on a 12-day tour in the US with senior officers of the Karnataka government.

The Karnataka government delegation led by M.B. Patil visited AMD's Innovation Centre.

AMD, a $150-billion company, manufactures microprocessors, motherboard chipsets, embedded processors, graphics processors, and FPGAs for servers, workstations, personal computers, and embedded systems applications.

AMD has been present in India since 2001.

Currently, the company has more than 6,500 employees in the country with offices spread across Bengaluru, New Delhi, Gurugram, Hyderabad, and Mumbai.

Karnataka Minister for Information Technology/Biotechnology and Science and Technology, Priyank Kharge; S. Selvakumar, Principal Secretary to the Karnataka government; Department of Commerce and Industries; Ekroop Caur, Secretary to Karnataka government, Department of Electronics Information Technology/Biotechnology and Science and Technology, and Gunjan Krishna, Commissioner for Industrial Development, and Director, Industries, and Commerce were present during the occasion.