![]() “Because if it’s five or ten, it’s hard.” “Three things, just to keep it simple,” she says. That rallying cry was also an edict and step one in her three-pronged plan to fix AMD: Create great products, deepen customer trust and simplify the company. “You might think that was obvious, but it wasn’t to the company at the time.” On her second day as CEO, Su stepped up to the microphone during an all-hands call with a message for AMD’s demoralized employees: “I believe that we can build the best,” she remembers telling her staff. AMD had once commanded about a quarter of the now $24 billion server chip market, but its share dwindled to 2% in 2014. As were about a quarter of AMD’s staff, sacked by Su’s predecessor, Rory Read (Sanders stepped down as CEO in 2002). AMD, which had been a perennial second-rater, began generating record profits by building its own processors that beat Intel’s on speed.īy 2014, those glory days were long gone. Sanders broke into the microprocessor business making chips for IBM in the early 1980s, but things started to change in the late ’90s and early 2000s. “Our technology wasn’t competitive at the time,” Su admits.ĪMD hadn’t always been such a headache for investors. It couldn’t hit product deadlines, and Intel dominated all but the bargain end of the laptop market with Nvidia, Qualcomm and Samsung carving up the new smartphone business. More troubling, AMD was struggling to execute. Its fabrication plant where chips are baked (“fabs,” in industry-speak) was spun off in 2009-a blow to AMD cofounder Jerry Sanders’ infamous boast that “real men have fabs.” It even had to sell and lease back its corporate campus, in Austin, Texas-Su’s current base-in 2013. Some of its prized assets were already being sold for parts. WHEN SU WAS promoted into AMD’s top job in 2014, analysts were calling the company “uninvestable,” with $2.2 billion in debt. Her secret weapon: the Instinct MI300 (shown here), a chip that melds traditional CPUs with GPU processors that are often used in gaming. “We will always assume that Intel will fix it.” “There are many great things about AMD, but the bad thing is that we have two world-class competitors,” says AMD exec Forrest Norrod, who helped Dell build its approximately $10 billion (2014 revenue) data center business in part on AMD chips and adds that the company never assumes its main rival will let problems linger. of PCs has faced further manufacturing delays, chip defects and leadership changes. Meanwhile, the specter of Intel still looms across Highway 101, even as the O.G. “That’s pretty well-entrenched, and AMD has to really step up its game to overcome that.” “AI equals Nvidia,” says Glenn O’Donnell, a Forrester analyst. Already there is huge demand for the GPUs that power them, and at least one research firm foresees a $400 billion bonanza within the next decade for the companies that make them. ![]() These so-called large language models are really just stunning parlor tricks, but they’re the opening act for an AI transformation that big shots like Bill Gates say will be as significant as the dawn of the internet. Beyond rendering stunning imagery in games like Cyberpunk 2077, its GPUs (graphics processing units) have become the engine of choice for artificial intelligence companies such as OpenAI, whose ChatGPT chatbot has delighted and disturbed the public by answering questions and commands with surprisingly detailed human-sounding responses. Unlike Intel, though, whose revenue has seen a 12% decrease to $63.1 billion over three years, Nvidia appears at the top of its game. ![]()
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