#Amd ceo Pc

One important piece of career advice she got as a young engineer was: 'You should run toward problems.' She got a PhD in electrical engineering from MIT, and worked in the chip industry with Texas Instruments, IBM and Freescale Semiconductor. She also developed an early interest in tinkering with gadgets, once fixing her younger brother's remote-controlled car. Her parents - her dad is a mathematician and his mom is an entrepreneur - 'steered her to the hard sciences,' she said. The daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, she moved to the US when she was around 2. She learned about patience in her long career in tech and the chip industry. It takes five years and you have to be patient.' You cannot say, 'Hey, I want to do something faster.' You can't. 'When you're running these large technology projects, you cannot get distracted. 'Our job was not to get distracted,' Su said. By the fourth quarter of 2018, AMD had 3.7%. It had 1.1% share of total shipments of server chips in the last quarter of 2014 when Su became CEO, according to analyst firm IDC. But AMD has zoomed ahead of Intel in embracing a 7 nanometer process, referring to the manufacturing technology based on the line-width on chips.ĪMD quickly regained lost ground.

Intel historically has led the way in producing smaller and less expensive processors. Not only was its technology deemed better than Intel's, industry experts say that AMD also outpaced Intel in an area where its bigger competitor had long had an advantage: manufacturing technology. Epyc put AMD back in the game in the data center market. In 2017, AMD introduced its first server processor under Su, called Epyc.

#Amd ceo Pc

With the PC market sliding, both Intel and AMD had turned their sights on the data center market. 'To say that we were going to build our strategy around high performance computing and data centers took conviction that we had the technology to do it.'

'We had almost zero market share or may be just 1% at the time,' Su said. As it was in the PC market, AMD had been the David to Intel's Goliath in server chips - a smaller player that occasionally outmaneuvered its bigger rival with more impressive technology, but for the most part remained in the second-place spot.īy the time Su became CEO, even that underdog position had been undermined, with AMD at a severe disadvantage to Intel.

That plan was based on one mantra, she said: 'Push the envelope on high performance computing.' PCs and graphics chips were important arenas, but the big prize for AMD was the data center market which was 'going through tremendous disruption.'Ĭloud computing was taking off, which boosted demand for high-performance server processors for new, more sophisticated data centers. '2019 is a very special year as it relates to seeing a plan come to fruition,' Su told Business Insider. 5-year journeyįor Su, the product rollout capped a 5-year journey in which she led the Silicon Valley company from a struggling chipmaker into a more disciplined and focused competitor taking on a changing tech landscape. That meant AMD's Epyc chip is now used by the three major cloud providers, including Microsoft and Amazon. So impressive, in fact Google announced that it was embracing the new Epyc processor for both internal use and to power some of its cloud-computing services. In a note to clients, Wedbush analyst Matt Bryson called the chip's reported performance 'clearly impressive,' while Rosenblatt Securities' Hans Mosenmann said that the new Epyc chip would 'destroy' Intel's competing products with higher performance for less money. This week's rally was sparked by AMD's new server chip, the second-generation Epyc processor for data centers and cloud platforms, which quickly won rave reviews and highlighted a big win for AMD. The stock is up more than 50% this year, 12-fold from when Su's term began. On Thursday, AMD shares soared 16% closing at $33.92. You could have bought a bag of chips for the same price as it would take to buy in to the ailing chipmaker.įast forward five years: a dramatically different AMD. The PC market, where it had slugged it out for decades with rival Intel, was imploding.ĪMD stock was a little under $3 when Su took over, sinking even lower to about $1.60 a few months into her term. The chipmaker was virtually dead in the water in the market for data center chips, where it held 1% market share, which at times dipped even lower. Her goal is to build on AMDs momentum with a more consistent, focused performance in its rivalry with Intel.ĪMD was crumbling when Lisa Su was named CEO in 2014.

The upbeat response to AMD's new product highlighted Su's successful run as CEO of a major semiconductor company.

Its stock soared this week after the company rolled out a new server chip.

AMD was a struggling tech company when CEO Lisa Su took over in 2014.

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