Name: AMD's CEO Wants to Chip Away at Nvidia's Lead | The Circuit with Emily Chang
Uploaded: 2024-12-10T08:43:46.000Z
Duration: 24 min 2 s
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There's no shortage of drama when it comes to chip making.

Adverbs of degree

Even when you're winning, the game changes.

Do you ever feel like you're running a race that just never stops?

I'm running, like, a different company every few years.

Like, the industry is changing that fast.

The technology that we're building is changing that fast.

It's a fantastic race, though, because each race is different.

It's like a different movie, but it's a more exciting movie each time.

Lisa Su, the CEO of Advanced Microdevices, likes to be in the driver's seat.

Born in Taiwan and raised in New York with a passion for electrical engineering and three degrees from MIT,

Su worked at a couple of big-name chip makers before clinching a big victory, transforming AMD from a failing chip company into a formidable force in gaming,

She's quick to remind us that her secret weapon is an obsession with the tech itself.

Her no-nonsense approach probably helps, too.

I've heard you don't take s*** from anyone.

Seriously, I've heard you're tough as nails, and I'm sure you have to be.

I would tell people I was doing semiconductors, and they would say, what? Like, what's that?

Like, you build chips? Like, what does that mean?

People didn't even understand, like, where technology really fit in the grand scheme of things.

Chips rule just about everything around us.

It's one of the most ubiquitous and consequential technologies in the world.

They power your smartphones, cars, planes, power grids, the Internet, the global economy, and even Formula One races, where AMD sponsors the Mercedes-AMG Petronas team.

I think the adaptability that you need to have in this sport is similar to a high-performance real-world company.

The technology develops, and that's why it's so much fun, and what I love is the stopwatch never lies.

Chips are at the heart of a global technology race and a battle for supremacy between China and the United States.

She's in the middle of a race of her own, pulling off the impossible by surpassing arch-rival Intel, only to find that AI has completely changed the game, and now NVIDIA is in the lead.

I'm in Austin to see how Sue competes on and off the track and if she can pull off the unthinkable once again.

So the first thing we did when we got here is we went to your lab and your engineers made us this chip.

This is our epic with the circuit with Emily Chang.

You've been working in the chip industry for decades.

When did you first hear that you were going to be CEO of AMD?

It's a phone call you get from your chairman of the board, and he said, Lisa, can you talk?

He said, you know, the board has made a decision.

Well, how did that feel? Because it was a tough time.

What made you think you could prove them wrong?

The opportunity to be CEO of AMD, it was truly like a dream come true.

Like, you think that maybe you can do this?

And here you're going to have the opportunity to lead a major semiconductor company on, yes, you're right, it wasn't the best time.

I was pretty confident that we had the right pieces.

They just needed to be put together in the right way.

AMD was founded in 1969 by executives from Fairchild Semiconductor, the famed company that pioneered integrated circuits.

Founder Jerry Sanders was famous for saying, real men have fabs.

Those are the plants that manufacture chips.

AMD started off as a memory chip maker like Intel and followed its larger rival into new markets, but always struggled to achieve the scale and performance Intel enjoyed.

AMD had to spin off those fabs and outsource its manufacturing.

A sign of the uphill battle Sue was facing, few believed AMD would make it until she started making her moves.

Now AMD stock is trading in a totally different stratosphere.

Was there a moment along the way where you really saw AMD turn a corner?

Probably the most important moment for us was the launch of our new architecture, the launch of Zen.

Zen was our clean sheet design to really design the next generation architecture in CPUs for the next decade.

AMD's main competition in designing the best chips comes from two players,

NVIDIA in graphics processing units, or GPUs, and Intel in central processing units, or CPUs.

A CPU is the Swiss army knife of semiconductors.

They run operating systems and programs, retrieve files, and are generally the heart of a computer.

A GPU, or graphics chip, is much more specialized.

They were designed to do multiple small calculations simultaneously.

That parallel processing makes them ideal for AI.

The new Zen architecture put AMD back on top and gave it a range of chips capable of taking market share from Intel.

Like, do you ever just, like, shut the door and go, yes, all by yourself?

You know, those first few years were more about just stabilizing the company and getting ourselves on a good roadmap, and then we went through a period of just tremendous growth around the portfolio, and now we're in the AI world.

How would you describe the pace right now?

I truly believe AI is the most transformational technology that I've seen in my career.

And, you know, we've seen all kinds of technology transitions.

We've seen, you know, the rise of the PCs, mobile phones, the cloud.

All of these things were all really megatrends.

I think AI actually surpasses all of that.

The rate and pace of change in the industry, it's, like, faster than anything we've ever seen.

It's like we've made more progress in the last 18 months than certainly the last 10-plus years.

Now, to win and keep winning, you have to keep up the pace and keep bringing the heat over decades.

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AMD's CEO Wants to Chip Away at Nvidia's Lead | The Circuit with Emily Chang

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