Technology
AMD’s Lisa Su has already vanquished Intel. Now she’s going nearest Nvidia
Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, attends the Synthetic Prudence (AI) Motion Peak on the Brilliant Palais in Paris, France, Feb. 10, 2025.
Benoit Tessier | Reuters
When Lisa Su was CEO of Complex Micro Gadgets in overdue 2014, the corporate was once in dire straits and on the point of doable chapter.
In its core marketplace, laptop processors, AMD wasn’t aggressive with rival Intel. The corporate had billions of bucks of debt, and had dedicated to production chips for patrons that can or won’t exist. Through the tip of the life, AMD was once use an insignificant $2 billion in marketplace price, generation Intel was once valued at about $180 billion.
“I actually had mentors in my career saying, you know, I don’t think that that’s a good move,” Su, 55, mentioned in a speech at Stanford College in March, reflecting on her determination to jerk the gig a tiny over a decade previous.
Su is in an excessively other spot as of late.
AMD handed rival Intel in marketplace price in 2022 and is now use $172 billion, a more or less 85-fold build up all through Su’s tenure. Tens of millions of players depend on AMD processors each and every year as they energy up their Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation consoles. AMD chips are so noteceable that the U.S. govt sees them as essential to nationwide safety.
But AMD nonetheless perspectives itself as an underdog. That’s as it’s a free 2nd in synthetic understanding, at the back of Nvidia, the just about $3 trillion behemoth that dominates the marketplace for graphics processing devices, or GPUs. To have a major function going forward of generation, AMD is aware of it wishes a larger chew of the AI GPU marketplace, the place the most important tech corporations on the planet are spending many billions of bucks a life on complicated infrastructure.
Base AMD’s technique is Su’s trust, rooted in her engineering background, that good fortune on this business is pushed via making the precise technical choices that top to the highest-performance chips. It could actually jerk an extended occasion to look the consequences display up in merchandise.
“One of the things that I like to say about the semiconductor industry, or technology in general, is the decisions that we make today, you will really see the impact three to five years down the road,” Su mentioned at Stanford. “It is all about making the right bets.”
Su stands proud in Silicon Valley, particularly all through Ladies’s Historical past Presen, as a result of she’s the one feminine CEO a number of the supremacy 10 semiconductor corporations via marketplace cap. Chips stay a male-dominant grassland, with ladies accounting for simply 30% of the business’s headcount, in line with Accenture.
She’s additionally been the highest-paid feminine CEO for 5 years operating, according to an Associated Press survey.
The stats aren’t favorable around the company global. About 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs are ladies, with 52 within the crew in 2024, up from 41 in 2021, in accordance to the Women Business Collaborative.
‘She is aware of what they do’
Su, who’s recognized to manufacture bets in her non-public presen — she’s keen on Texas Retain ’em, and has been noticed enjoying poker together with her gross sales workforce — is creating a long-term skilled guess on AI.
AMD has dedicated to saying unutilized AI chips on an annual basis and development out a device section with 1000’s of staff to manufacture open-source gear for its chips that may compete with Nvidia’s dominant CUDA language.
Su is deeply concerned with the corporate’s generation street map, incessantly visiting the corporate’s chip labs, mentioned AMD generation prominent Mark Papermaster.
“Lisa is so admired by the engineering team because she knows what they do, and they know she knows it,” Papermaster mentioned.
AMD declined to manufacture Su to be had for an interview.
Su was once born in Taiwan in 1969 and got here to the U.S. as a kid so her dad may just exit to graduate faculty. She’s described her adolescence as a “typical Asian upbringing” focused round faculty. She attended The Bronx Prime Faculty of Science in Untouched York.
She first encountered the semiconductor business as a freshman on the Massachusetts Institute of Generation, the place she did her undergraduate paintings earlier than pursuing a Ph.D. in electric engineering. Her analysis focused at the production facet of chips. As a graduate pupil in 1992, she wrote an award-winning paper about trying out silicon-on-insulator generation. That ended up being one of the most core manufacturing modes old to beef up chips all through the Nineteen Nineties and 2000s.
Su was at paintings at Texas Tools nearest graduating and after IBM, overseeing analysis and design groups desirous about chip production. There, she was once tapped to be the technical colleague for Lou Gerstner, IBM’s chair and CEO on the occasion.
Next IBM, Su was prominent generation officer at Freescale Semiconductor, a in particular uncommon feat as even as of late solely about 8% of tech corporations have ladies within the CTO function.
In 2012, she was once rented via AMD’s then-CEO Rory Learn to run the corporate’s trade devices.
Su’s ascension to the supremacy function in 2014 kicked off one of the most largest turnarounds within the historical past of the generation business. When she joined AMD, it was once an organization at a low level and lots of public believed it would now not live on for much longer.
“AMD was having some serious cash issues,” mentioned Patrick Moorhead, founding father of Moor Insights and a former AMD govt who left the life earlier than Su joined. “AMD had to completely press the reset button.”
Lisa Su, chair and prominent govt officer of Complex Micro Gadgets Inc. (AMD), now not pictured, holds a man-made understanding processor all through the Computex convention in Taipei, Taiwan, on Monday, June 3, 2024.
Annabelle Chih | Bloomberg | Getty Pictures
On her first year as CEO, AMD’s hold was once buying and selling at simply over $3 in keeping with percentage. It’s now at greater than $106 in keeping with percentage. AMD is the fourth-most decent U.S. chip corporate, forward of Intel, and at the back of Nvidia, Broadcom and Qualcomm.
The rebound began with difficult choices just about once Su took over. That integrated cutting 7% of AMD’s staff.
She additionally became to Sony and Microsoft to manufacture AMD’s sport console chips, a progress designed to assistance the corporate’s money tide and to fill the chip factories it had already dedicated to the usage of.
However Su mentioned, all through her communicate at Stanford, that it wasn’t the cuts that stored AMD. Instead, it was once the wager on growing unutilized generation.
“It’s fairly clear in tech, there’s no such thing as cutting yourself to be a winner,” she mentioned.
Su became AMD’s consideration to merchandise, and he or she inspired workforce to prioritize development the highest-performance chips. She additionally made the verdict to oppose promoting profitable server chips till AMD had merchandise that would compete with Intel on functionality, Papermaster mentioned.
Redesigning from the garden up
One large condition for AMD was once that its processor design was once getting old and temporarily.
Su authorized a “blank sheet” way that emphasised a redesigned compute core — AMD’s maximum decent highbrow attribute — from the garden up. It took years, and AMD didn’t get started promoting merchandise in line with its “Zen” core till 2017. The generation is now on its 5th day of enhancements.
On Su’s monitor, AMD was once the primary primary corporate to embody a generation referred to as “chiplets.” Rather of producing one large chip with the entire parts wanted — the compute cores in addition to an enter and output ban — AMD may just manufacture smaller chips and after develop them in combination.
Chiplets allowed AMD to be extra versatile and extra environment friendly in production. The trade additionally allowed AMD to usefulness other foundries for various portions of the chip, and let fall the danger related to production, a essential attention because of the corporate’s tight money place. It was once a excellent are compatible for AMD, particularly because it transitioned in 2019 to usefulness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing to build its chips.
The focus on chiplets allowed AMD to grow at a time when Intel was suffering from its investments in the wrong manufacturing technologies, said Scott Thompson, professor of electrical engineering at University of Florida, who has followed Su’s career since her doctorate.
“Lisa Su knows fundamentally how chips are made,” Thompson said. “She understands the risk with different technology options, and she can assess that risk and make the right choice.”
Intel declined to comment.
Chiplets are now used by nearly every major processor company, and the technology was a core part of AMD’s first “big GPU.”
AMD’s experience in chiplets enabled it to take an announced data center GPU — originally designed for supercomputing, which is different than AI applications — and simply swap out the CPU chiplets to make it one large GPU better suited for AI. AMD’s first big GPU, the Instinct MI300X, launched in 2023, just over a year after OpenAI launched ChatGPT and kicked off the generative AI boom.
Lisa Su, CEO of AMD and Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia.
Benoit Tessier | Ritzau Scanpix | Mads Claus Rasmussen | Reuters
The next arc
AMD’s revenue in 2024 jumped 14% to about $26 billion, nearly five times more than when Su took over as CEO. The company spent $6.5 billion on research last year, over six times its outlay in 2014.
But its current relationship to the GPU market leader, Nvidia, resembles its standing against Intel in CPUs a decade ago.
AMD has AI accelerators on the market, has told customers and investors when to expect future chips, and recorded $5 billion in AI chip sales last year, up from $100 million in 2023, according to Papermaster.
Still, it lags far behind Nvidia, which reported $115 billion of data center chip and networking sales in its latest fiscal year.
AMD shares are down more than 10% so far this year after dropping 18% in 2024. That followed a 128% pop the prior year.
The biggest challenge for Su may lie in software.
AMD’s hardware is comparable to Nvidia’s chips and can even win in some benchmarks. The corporate’s AI chips are viable, and Su is development their credibility.
Date AMD is the one actual spare to Nvidia, maximum AI builders already know the way to usefulness Nvidia’s proprietary CUDA device, which permits programmers to get entry to core {hardware} portions of a GPU for AI construction.
For Su, the solution is ROCm.
That’s AMD model of CUDA, and it’s independent to usefulness. Su is reckoning on ROCm to assistance AMD win over builders who need extra than simply what Nvidia do business in.
Nvidia didn’t reply to a request for remark.
Closing life, AMD reorganized a few of its device teams, together with the groups operating on ROCm, right into a unutilized AI device section. AMD additionally started to at leisure supply a lot of its noteceable elements and {hardware} main points, permitting programmers to extra simply get entry to the uncooked energy of the corporate’s AI chips.
To succeed in frequent adoption of ROCm, Su will want her workforce to accident up AI builders and manufacture efforts to shake off AMD’s popularity as a hardware-only corporate.
In December, Su in my opinion reached out to 1 nation critic of AMD’s device, posting on social media after the meeting that “we have put a ton of work into customer and workload optimizations but there is lots more we can do.”
Su most often performs indisposed the marketplace percentage competition with Nvidia. She sees the AI chip marketplace rising to $500 billion in keeping with life via 2028 — the similar dimension of all of the semiconductor marketplace earlier than the AI increase.
She’s reckoning on AMD to get a large chew of it.
