As the name implies, it's the core process that provides the connectivity to your iPad and similar Apple mobile devices. Restarting it may restore connection to your iPad, if it's not being recognized in iTunes now. If your iPad is being recognized and is working correctly with iTunes, you should not muck with AMDS; there's almost certainly no need to, in any case. But it's unlikely to cause problems unless iTunes is in the midst of syncing with your iPad.
It shouldn't affect your iPad's content one bit, unless as I said you restart the service while iTunes is synching (or backing up). But if it is, that would mean that it's connecting to your iPad correctly in which case there's no reason to restart the service.
Might I ask what problem you are indeed attempting to solve that leads you to ask this question?
Thanks for that, I am having the issue updating to iOS 4.3.
I feel one reason that it is not updating is because iTunes crashed while backing up, I pulled the plug on my iPad, and that has caused me a few issues on sync ever since. I managed fix some issues, but I feel that both could be related. I figured maybe restarting AMDS would help.
I missed the 4.3 mention. If you're having problems with that, you need to take that up in the developer forums Apple provides for registered developers. Apple needs to know about any such issues, so take it up there and file a bug report.
I know, I am not the only one with the issue, I am to bring it up in developer forums, or just wait till beta 2, I didn't mention it in this post before as I know i'm not allowed to discuss pre-release stuff!