This week’s Stratechery Interview is with AMD CEO Lisa Su. Su began her career at Texas Instruments, after earning her PhD in electrical engineering at MIT, where she played a significant role in developing silicon-on-insulator transistor technology. Su then spent 12 years at IBM, where she led the development of copper interconnects for semiconductors, served as technical assistant to CEO Lou Gerstner, and led the team that created the Cell microprocessor used in the PlayStation 3. After a stint as the CTO of Freescale Semiconductor, Su joined AMD in 2012, before ascending to the CEO role in 2014.
Su has led a remarkable run of success for AMD over the last decade. After decades of being an also-ran to Intel, AMD has developed the best x86 chips in the world, and continues to take significant share from Intel in datacenters in particular. AMD has also been a major player in console gaming, in addition to its traditional PC business and graphics chip business. That GPU business is now increasingly at center stage, as AMD takes on Nvidia in the market for datacenter GPUs.
In this interview, conducted a day after Su’s Computex keynote, we talk about Su’s career path, including lessons she learned at her various stops to the top, before discussing why AMD has been able to achieve so much during her tenure. We discuss how the “ChatGPT” moment changed the industry, how AMD has responded, and why Su believes the long-run structure of the industry will ultimately work in the company’s favor.
If you get paywalled (I wasn't for this post, but idk how this site is set up?) TH has recapped a little bit of it here.
An invented creation used to segment regions of the Earth in homebrew RPG campaigns :P