Comment by refurb

She worked as a researcher in the field for decades. Moore's law only kept up because of some of the techniques she developed.

> During her time at IBM,[6] Su played a "critical role"[7] in developing the "recipe"[2] to make copper connections work with semiconductor chips instead of aluminum, "solving the problem of preventing copper impurities from contaminating the devices during production".[7] Working with various IBM design teams on the details of the device, Su explained, "my specialty was not in copper, but I migrated to where the problems were".[6] The copper technology was launched in 1998,[7] resulting in new industry standards[22] and chips that were up to 20% faster than the conventional versions.[6][7]

AMD was close to ruin when Lisa took over. It had completely lost the graphics and x64 wars and was limping by on low margin games consoles.

Since then Epyc has broken Intel. Anyone buying Xeon's today is at credible risk of being fired over it when someone notices the power bill relative to their competition.

The graphics ramp is behind Nvidia in mind share and market share. The ROCm software stack gets a lot of grief on here. Nevertheless, Nvidia lost the frontier and el cap bids and now Microsoft is running GPT4 on AMD hardware. Sounds pretty good to me given it's one product line of many.

If turning a multinational semiconductor firm away from the edge of bankruptcy and into the profitable conglomerate it is today doesn't qualify as "solving a hard problem" I don't know what would. It's way beyond what I'd be capable of doing.

Lisa Su is one of the (surprisingly rare) tech CEOs who comes from an engineering background.

Much of the hard problems these days require scale and with it coordination

It says in the article that he was asked by readers to do a Lisa Su interview. The headline is a little misleading, they don't talk much about technological problems. The interview is a soft light tour of her career and a few attempts to get her to talk about the present day business. Interviews with someone like Musk or Jensen are much more technically intense.

Honestly this interview feels bearish for AMD. Su's performance is not good. Thompson repeatedly pushes her to reflect on past mistakes, but it's just not happening. The reason why AMD has fallen so far behind NVIDIA shine through clear as day and it doesn't look like it's going to get fixed anytime soon.

Su's problem and therefore AMD's problem is that she doesn't want to think about software at all. Hardware is all she knows and she states that openly. Nor does she seem to consider this a weakness. The problem goes back to the very start of her career. The interview opens with Thompson saying she faced a choice between computer science and electronics engineering at MIT, and she picked EE because it was harder. Is that true? She's nowhere in AI due to lack of sufficient skilled devs so now would be a good time to talk up the importance of software, but no, she laughs and says sure! CS seemed easy to her because you "just" write software instead of "building things", whereas in electronics your stuff "has to work". End of answer.

He tries to get a comment on the (in hindsight) not great design tradeoffs made by the Cell processor, which was hard to program for and so held back the PS3 at critical points in its lifecycle. It was a long time ago so there's been plenty of time to reflect on it, yet her only thought is "Perhaps one could say, if you look in hindsight, programmability is so important". That's it! In hindsight, programmability of your CPU is important! Then she immediately returns to hardware again, and saying how proud she was of the leaps in hardware made over the PS generations.

He asks her if she'd stayed at IBM and taken over there, would she have avoided Gerstner's mistake of ignoring the cloud? Her answer is "I don’t know that I would’ve been on that path. I was a semiconductor person, I am a semiconductor person." - again, she seems to just reject on principle the idea that she would think about software, networking or systems architecture because she defines herself as an electronics person.

Later Thompson tries harder to ram the point home, asking her "Where is the software piece of this? You can’t just be a hardware cowboy ... What is the reticence to software at AMD and how have you worked to change that?" and she just point-blank denies AMD has ever had a problem with software. Later she claims everything works out of the box with AMD and seems to imply that ROCm hardly matters because everyone is just programming against PyTorch anyway!

The final blow comes when he asks her about ChatGPT. A pivotal moment that catapults her competitor to absolute dominance, apparently catching AMD unaware. Thompson asks her what her response was. Was she surprised? Maybe she realized this was an all hands to deck moment? What did NVIDIA do right that you missed? Answer: no, we always knew and have always been good at AI. NVIDIA did nothing different to us.

The whole interview is just astonishing. Put under pressure to reflect on her market position, again and again Su retreats to outright denial and management waffle about "product arcs". It seems to be her go-to safe space. It's certainly possible she just decided to play it all as low key as possible and not say anything interesting to protect the share price, but if I was an analyst looking for signs of a quick turnaround in strategy there's no sign of that here.