AMD President and CEO Lisa Su | Full Interview | Code 2021

[Music] and i'm going to let john take this off oh wow yeah you're going to let me drive yeah that's right that's fantastic lisa great to have you and i just want to start off the chip industry and the shortages are just kind of top of mind for everybody so when is supply gonna catch up with demand right well first of all um cara thank you so much for for having uh having me here it's great to see john again we're old friends that talk often so uh look you know um for those of us in the semiconductor industry it's uh it's quite an experience to have you know semiconductors be in the headlines everywhere so we get it uh there's a supply shortage you know what um what's important for people to remember is you know the pandemic has just um just taken demand to a new level like nobody expected this much demand and frankly i think it's a great thing i mean what it says is that everybody needs chips no matter what you're doing whether it's your business your work you know your home your um you know your large enterprises and so on and so forth um we have to catch up and it hasn't cooled off right like it has not cooled off i would say demand has you know if you think about the semiconductor industry we've always gone through cycles of ups and downs where you know demand has exceeded supply or vice versa this time it's different and what's different this time is every industry needs more and so you know the confluence of that means that there is a there is an imbalance i will say that there's a tremendous amount of investment going in so uh there are you know over 20 new factories are coming online this year and and you know 20 more you know 20 plus more in um in planning and um so it's still going to be tight you know this year's tight first half of next year likely tight but it'll get better as we get into twenty where are the shortages from your perspective what is the if you broke it down and and how it occurred was the demand and the pandemic was that people wanted what so when you um like for example i can you know talk a little bit about you know sort of the pc industry right right people were thinking that you know pcs were actually a flat to declining market you know they weren't the sexy things you know necessarily uh flash to the pandemic and all of a sudden you know this is the way you communicate and when you were communicating for an hour to maybe you could do it on a on a phone or a tablet when you're communicating like you know 10 hours a day you need a different form factor and so we've seen a significant increase in demand there you know enterprises you know trying to really get all of their employees you know connected you know we've seen some stuff about automotive shortages because there were some supply chain interruptions there so it's just every market has seen the demand go up and um and the key here with these complex supply chains is you may need thousands of chips you know only one of them being short is going to cause you to not ship your system and so there's just a lot of let's call it mixing and matching of these things but you know what i will say is it will be solved okay we the semiconductor industry has been through these things and it it will absolutely um you know normalize uh supply deduction when do you expect that uh but i would say it gets better next year you know not not um not immediately but it will gradually get better as uh more and more plants come up and it takes you know we're an industry that just takes a long time to get anything done so you know it might take you know 18 to 24 months to put on a new plant and in some cases even longer than that and so you know these investments were started uh perhaps a year ago and so they're coming online you know as we as we go through uh the next couple of quarters so let's talk a little bit about your development cycle because one of the things you did people don't know you that well although what's happened at amd has been pretty remarkable um this is a company what was the shares selling for about 108 a share now yeah but when lisa started about three three dollars a share yeah so explain now one of the things one of the things pretty good um one of the things you're one of the highest paid women executives uh but but not but one of the 40th highest paid executive which sort of burned my ass kind of thing and why that was with this kind of performance but talk a little bit about what you did because some of it was removing your manufacturing talk a little bit about that journey of bringing that up yeah so um you know i'm an engineer by training so you know grew up in the semiconductor industry from the the r d side and one of the things about our business is uh you have to decide what you want to do like five years in advance right so whether it's you know what markets what products what technology and and actually you have to make choices about those technologies and so you know with amd i mean look um i love the company uh i i say this i'll say this you know with all um uh you know honesty it's it's my dream job to to be um you know the head of a large semiconductor company and uh there was a time when you know we weren't putting out products like you should and at the end of the day you know tech companies are about products so you have to put out great products and so we have uh you know over the past uh six or seven years you know we've really focused on what we're good at which is you know i always believed that computing would become extremely important sort of you know if you think about what would drive a society it's uh it's high performance computing and so that's where we put you know the eggs in those baskets there were things that we didn't do you know we're not in phones as as much as everyone has their phone we're not in phones and that's okay because that's not our specialty um you know we did make some choices you know not not doing our own manufacturing really focused on design and why did you do that why did you think that was you know the the truth is that um for for the size of company that we were we needed to focus on where we could be the absolute best and uh scale is important in um in manufacturing and um you know we just didn't think we could be the best at that so we wanted to partner uh with um you know others who could be very you know very good partners and focus on where we could be the best which is in you know semiconductor design and advanced uh technology i think maybe you're being a little bit too humble about it because amd used to be like the san jose sharks like one of those teams that'd be really good during the regular season and fall apart in the playoffs right so it's like you have good product but couldn't quite get it over the so and just i know you don't like talking about lisa sue but let's talk about lisa sue for a minute um you grew up in queens right in 1984 you were at bronx science with john favreau and mingen lee right that would have been a great team you should have gotten together and done something but like what's the queen's aspect of how you've run amd and managed to win consistently when it counted well well look i mean i don't know what you guys believe but i always believe um you can put together a great team with with great leadership and vision for where you want to go and you know for us at amd look we love what we do right we're about pushing the envelope on technology and what i needed to get the team thinking about is it's not like just what we did to do today it's you know customers and partners want to be able to believe in you you know for the next five years or the next 10 years and build those deep partnerships and so you know honestly john we were patient right i mean i told the guys look it's going to take us five years but we're going to build the best road map in the industry and i believe we can do it with the right choices um but you know you can't rush semiconductors so what's the what's the pandemic translation of that then because right now long-term plans are hard harder to make right like you can people have been saying all right hurry up what can you get me tomorrow but then when you're thinking about okay three to five years out what do we need so how do you translate what you did that was successful then into what companies and technology companies need to do now i think if there's one lesson for us all to learn about the pandemic is you have to think about the long term and you have to think about sort of the various contingencies that are required because all of these things that we never expected to happen have happened and um and so it is a mindset shift uh but i think people are very open to it i think you know like the collaboration that i see across the industry like when we talk about supply chain right we have had um the deepest conversations with our partners you know satya is going to be here later that microsoft yeah i mean they're all great partners uh because you got to solve this together right there's no one company that's going to be able to do this you know all by themselves all right when you think about that though um 11 thoughts on um the biden administration has been doing to support the competitiveness of american chip companies and that will lead us into china and the worries about ip theft and the building of their semiconductor industry um talk a little bit about you just joined a a a panel and at the same time three years ago you were getting a lot of pushback from the uh from uh regulators over your relationship with china itself yeah though it's um a great uh a great point i think the um the work that's you know the conversation that's being had today about um you know the semiconductor ecosystem the essential nature of the semiconductor ecosystem um you know there is a chips act that that has been passed as from a national security from a national security standpoint and from you know just a supply resiliency standpoint right just back to the you know you have to plan for every contingency so um i think we're very supportive of that and we're supportive of that because it does build a stronger semiconductor ecosystem and it should be there you know i'm very honored to be on uh you know the presidential council that was just recently announced i think the the fact that we can have a conversation about again back to long-term needs and um how do you support and and really uh uh you know promote innovation um i think is a great thing um you know back to your your question about china care i i would say that the world has changed and you know the world has evolved a bit from this notion of you know six or seven years ago i think there was a notion of hey um you know let's focus on sort of economic growth and you know we're all business people right i mean you know companies get bigger you can spend more on r d you can get stronger so on and so forth um and then i think the most recent conversation is around how can we do both right how can we protect national security because we all want to do that as well as still participate in a free market and um and that means that some technologies you know we really do have to keep uh you know more uh proprietary so when you look at what's going on in china right now the crackdown on the tech industry the growth of their semiconductor industry accusations of ip theft how do you think we should be dealing with the chinese well yeah there is certainly a lot going on there um i i think what i would say you know again i'm looking at it from a broad perspective i think you know decoupling isn't the answer um you know the the world is very intertwined and supply chains are very intertwined and and frankly innovation is really is uh um you know sort of encouraged when you you get people with different ideas together um that being the case i think the national security um you know i.t protections um you know ensuring that uh you know that's very well understood and you know as a ceo and maybe some of these these uh some of our audience can feel the same way i think we we want to work together with uh you know the government on on defining you know sort of you know what's the right balance because it is a balancing act there's not you know you can't go you know sort of student body left or student body right because it's just too disruptive to uh you know to everything are you worried about the advances their industries have made in this area you know i i actually um don't think about it that way i think about it as i always believe that the way to win is to run faster right you have to expect uh the competition is going to be strong uh whether it's another country or another company or and um you know we have to believe that you know the us is the leader in semiconductor design today we want to continue that and and so we have to run faster and uh you know that's that's a part of you know sort of all of this discussion about strengthening the ecosystem it seems to me like the huawei 5g situation is just untenable going forward like when i look at the semiconductor industry the most important chip company you know that nobody talks about is asml right that's in europe um i shouldn't say nobody talks about very few people outside the semiconductor industry talk about uh you've got you guys in the u.s you got all this manufacturing in in taiwan you i mean it's spread all over the place it's necessarily global so how do we how does the industry get in place the checks the security procedures so that you can be sure that a product that's shipped from whether it's china or wherever is secure for use in the eu in north america that the american government isn't sneaking stuff into equipment that's being sent to china et cetera yeah um security absolutely is a foundation we all have to trust the chips that we are building and buying i will say it's an area where there's a tremendous amount of collaboration amongst all of us in the industry so it's things like how do we get better hardware security so that actually even if you're in a cloud provider that they they can't access your data um it's things like you know how do we make sure that you know the software is more secure how do we you know look at those so i think security absolutely is a foundation um for that and as an industry you know it's it's something that we're very focused on so let's talk a little bit about industry consolidation um and some tech companies are thinking about producing semiconductors in the house is that a threat to amd i don't think so i don't think of it that way cara i would say that um you know all of us have our strategies for what we think are um uh you know what you think is the right path going forward the thing that's so interesting about the semiconductor industry today is you know like five years ago people said we were boring yeah i mean we were the maturing industry you know low single digit growth and and so on and so forth and i think the world has has really realized that you know this is now an essential part of everything that we do and so i believe there's um significant growth um for the industry not just from the standpoint of shipping more units but doing more for the world and doing more to um you know to really impact people's lives and as part of that you're going to pick what you're good at and so i think there's good secular growth for the industry and you know our place in that is you know we're going to be a leader in high performance design and others may want to you know do their own manufacturing and that's okay i think that answer was a good luck with that right i did not say that you said that all right but in a way it hasn't customization become part of your stretch like you've got chips in the ps5 right in the xbox those aren't the off-the-shelf chips that you would put in a pc though rumor has it it's going the other way now and you're taking some ps5 chips that didn't quite work out and putting them into pcs right well we use chips everywhere right okay okay but but is that sort of how you had to retool for this era of customization and moving beyond the pc is having teams who are able to serve a customer need instead of the other way around yeah what what we're really seeing is um the need for a lot more deep co-optimization you know when you think about you know we're building a you know foundational chip somebody else is building software somebody else is building a system if you do those things independently you're not going to be as good you're not going to be as efficient and so you know we talk about very deep partnerships and thinking about hey what are we trying to do for the world and then i can decide what do i want to design in the chip and um yeah i think those that type of customization is going to continue to be the case because you know you go back to the foundation of the world needs more compute now how do you get the world more compute at you know you know the you know the best prices the best performance the lowest power the most capability and and that customization is sort of an outcome you know of that so when you think about that talking about this growth something i asked you backstage is i said well you're not as big as intel yet and your answer was well i'm a lot bigger than i was right we're not that to to be fair more than fifty percent of until now market cap last to to be fair i think um uh we growth is so important in the semiconductor industry all right what has been their problem for growth then because you're you have been growing what is the they've been struggling well i would say the reason why we've been growing is um i think we we chose the right markets and um you know we we built just you know great product and i know that sounds simple but i i do believe it's it's as a tech company it's a you're you're very much a product of your roadmap and what you've been able to put on on board um you know i have a lot of respect for intel they're a great company but at the same time you become uh under scrutiny for for example your acquisition uh the impending acquisition of uh xylinx you may not be able to talk about it because of a pending merger but it'll be more scrutiny of you presumably well um we're very excited about the acquisition of xilinx um it has uh you know for us it's back to this notion of we want to be a bigger player in this computing market that's becoming larger and xilinx brings capabilities that we don't have it's they're very complementary you know it is true it's it's a big acquisition so it's going to get its fair share of of uh discussion um you know i i will say we've made great progress in uh getting the um uh the acquisition to closure and you know we hope to close by the end of this year that is consolidation inevitable in this industry do you see that consolidation is inevitable i would say um particularly if you want to make a big impact right i mean startups can do really cool things but if you know i've always i mean i have tremendous respect for these these folks who start their own companies but if you want to do something very large for the industry you know scale is important so what about these congressional moves toward making consolidation more difficult across industry and a lot of times it's based on the size of your company and as you mentioned you're getting bigger so the time might not be far when you know you're above you know you must be this tall to to ride you know the uh the consolidation roller coaster where you're you know you got a size issue when it comes to congress yeah i think the uh it's of course a balance and you know the idea is is at the end of the day competition is good for all of us um i certainly believe that and and part of you know our thought process has always been yes um you know we like to design things uh you know with our own components but we're also designing things you know with uh with our partner congress going too far perhaps doing to be careful yeah i don't know if i would say that i would just say that i think these are very individual decisions um that are made as you look at markets and as you look at you know sort of how they how they come together all right i want we're going to get to the tech itself one of the things lisa said i really want to talk about the future tech super computing and et cetera but i think i'd be remiss if i didn't get your thoughts on issues around diversity you're an immigrant who came to america from taiwan at the age of two there's been obviously anti-asian things happening racial divides in america you are one of the few female ceos in the fortune 500 companies which i am sorry to say that but it's the case can you give us some thoughts on where you see this going yeah uh you know i i think diversity is always top of mind uh for me i think even more so for um you know for us and in today's world um there are not enough women in tech i mean state the obvious uh but it is getting better from the standpoint that i think there's more conversation about it and you know my philosophy has always been to work on things that i can impact and so um you know trying to get uh you know sort of more you know women into the pipeline trying to to get give people more opportunity you know as they come into engineering you know the one thing i like to say about engineering is like you know one of the reasons i love it is it's very black and white right i mean either you know the product works or it doesn't work um you know you don't have to kind of you know sell it much um otherwise and i think that's a very positive thing so you know just trying to get more opportunities for you know for women and and um and and sort of underrepresented minorities to see how you how you can make an impact as a ceo how are you managing that out of this pandemic we talk about the great resignation and how that's particularly affecting tech so often in these periods we see either women sometimes very talented women moving out of the track toward advancement because they're forced to make other choices um are you seeing that potentially within amd are there ways that you're able to answer that i i think what we're seeing is that you know people expect and we can provide um a lot more flexibility than we did before like the mindset has changed right we used to think hey you know you know being you know if you're on the fast track you're you're in you know the office whatever you know you know five days a week you know 12 hours a day whatever it is i think that mindset has changed i think the mindset has also changed around it's okay to say that you need to take a break and you know the company can work around that and um and i think that's a good thing i think the conversation is a very good thing do you have to model that do you have to stay home sometimes in order to let other people understand if they can um i i do and i can't say i don't ever but i don't as much as i should so so let's talk about the tech talk about where things are going let's end up we have a few minutes then we'll have questions from the audience but where do you see what what's happening next around supercomputing and other areas that you yes right so um i'm super excited about the technology and you know again i think what's been so interesting for me is we've gone from a period where um you know computing perhaps was under the covers and people didn't really appreciate what you could do to a place where now it's like you know on the front page of the journal or the times and people are saying well how do i get more chips and what's very exciting is that people used to ask can you use more computing like do you need more computing nobody asks that anymore right what you should be asking is how do i get more and use it more efficiently and so um you know we're very big on you know this notion of you know um john you mentioned it you know sort of how do you customize you know computing capability like we're building right now uh with um oak ridge national labs um you know what we hope to be you know the fastest super computer in the world and um honestly you know a couple years ago we didn't know quite how to do that but we said hey that's that's the you know the the big big goal and we're gonna find a way to do that and um we're making good progress so yeah i think you know computing will help us in every aspect whether you talk about you know during covid um with medical research and you know vaccine research and modeling around you know you know climate change and uh you know all of these things so yeah i'm very excited about that um [Music] i wonder when you're talking about super computing and its role uh in the ecosystem is it is it still setting the bar does it have is it like the emmys right where if you if you have the fastest super computer there's a halo effect that further benefits you well i think there's a couple things right when you have the fastest supercomputer what you can do is think about now how many more of these can i build for the next hundred of them or the next thousand or the next ten thousand and how do i change the work that you're doing in your data center and you know um you know we've talked a lot about john how you know cloud is becoming so much more important you know super computing is now a big thing in the cloud like that never used to be people used to have to build their own now you can rent a supercomputer and and really try out your next ideas so i i think the the key there is i'm a big believer in if you push the envelope on technology you will get a lot of benefits in sort of more commercial you know applications so what is your next push the envelope effort so you know can i be just a little geeky just please go for it you know i had you here we we talk about this thing called um heterogeneous computing now the way i could describe it maybe is you know we talk about hybrid cars right and hybrid cars are cool because you know you can you can use the electric vehicle when you need it and you can use uh gas when you need it you know heterogeneous computing is the same thing it's it's the idea that you know i can build a system for you that will know what you're trying to do and i will use the best compute for what you're doing and um i think that's the big vision of where computing is going and that's how we get uh get things sort of a lot more um a lot more capable and you know you hear people talk about the metaverse and you know what happens there and so oh yeah i think that's the next do you want a metaverse do i want a metaverse well you know i i watch star trek as a kid i mean it's like the holodeck right um i don't think i could say that i want the metaverse i would say that that's one of the outcomes of uh the computing applications that are out there that you are made that you're facilitating yeah so let me ask this when when there's when you talk about these things super computers uh heterogeneous isn't it yeah you got it computing it's not pacquiaki i get it okay um there's also fear about technology which sort of has been building obviously the government now has moved in not at you necessarily but at social media companies and other places you know i spent a lot of time having talked about it and here we are how do you mitigate that where you focus in on the good things that it can do because text seems to have lost that narrative um and you all get the people at other companies that are not facebook slash twitter slash are like those they've ruined it for all of us like kind of thing i don't know if you think that but how do you get that back the idea of making things that are like astonishing and helpful to humanity well i i think i think it's you know hindsight is always 20 20. i think foresight is what we're trying to get to and uh you know the technology capability is there to do amazing things i think we as you know leaders uh you know need to ensure that what it's doing is great good things and not great you know not so good things but honestly cara i would say that it you know hindsight's always 20 20 on these things and i think we're learning along the way right so this whole conversation of what is good ai i think we're all learning along the way and i like to believe that one of the most important thing for us as tech leaders is continue to learn and that doesn't mean you make every decision correctly but it means that when you see that something needs to be course corrected you actually course correct well that would be a fresh new idea and technology let's get to questions from the audience questions anybody here we go okay michael miller pc magazine hi lisa hi uh i'd like to hear you talk a little bit about the change in the enterprise computing market when you took over most of enterprise sales server sales you sold to a couple big server companies who sold to you know a huge number of customers now over half the business is selling to a handful of big cloud providers how has that changed how you think about making chips and selling yeah so uh you know the data center sort of has evolved so much as you said over the the last uh number of years um i think where we see it is um you know the large cloud companies really are pushing the envelope they have the ability to move extremely quickly and extremely um sort of uh you know sort of um sort of in that customization type approach and so we appreciate those deep partnerships but that being the case um you know i think we're all living in a hybrid world where we have our own data centers as well as using the cloud and so we continue to work uh with you know the large number of enterprise customers as well so i think it's just at a different pace is this what i would say over here howdy um i was uh curious about uh how you think about crypto mining on your cards i know y'all have uh said that y'all aren't limiting crypto mining on your cards and but there's uh rumors that maybe y'all are producing uh you know cards that are specific to crypto mining how do you think about crypto mining well i i would say it's a pretty volatile space um so i think just a little yeah uh as it relates to us i would say crypto mining is a it's a small part of our our business i mean you know some people do use gpus for things like ethereum mining uh but it's it's not you know a large piece of our business um i will say that we are trying really hard uh to get um you know sort of more products to gamers because you know gamer like i get so many you know dear lisa can you help me get a gaming card so um there there's a there's a lot of that out there but our focus is much more on the core business and not so much on crypto should it be on crypto um i don't believe it should you know i don't believe it should i think it's a like like i said it's a very volatile space and you know at the end of the day you know we're we're building for sort of um you know sort of in this case consumer applications and that's where the focus is do you help them get a gaming card when they write you directly yeah or a ps5 um i i do try when i can okay okay over here last question um curious about what the semiconductor industry is doing around carbon footprint um is it even something that you can make an impact in because as you continue to make things more efficient then people just want more power so just curiously the approach that you all are taking yeah actually it's a great question um we absolutely can do something about the carbon footprint i think the semiconductor industry you know when you think about you know sort of our goals and and they're very aligned with the notion of we want to make computing more efficient which is more performance less power less emissions and you know we have some goals that you know we set for our products that uh you know we're just about to announce a goal that that says by 2025 we want to be 30x more efficient than we are today so absolutely the industry can participate should participate and um it's something that uh that that's top of mind over here hi thanks dr lisa for sharing i wanted to ask i know you talked about running faster than your competition and that being very important can i understand where does packaging fit in for you because we're talking a lot about front end and we're talking about wafer fabrication where does packaging fit in in the next 10 years for you yeah yeah so i i think the um when we think about you know this whole conversation of moore's law and moore's law slowing you have to think about different ways of innovating and packaging is one of those very very important ways of innovating so you know we've been very focused on that and we'll continue to be very focused on that as a way to sort of back to how do we make computing more efficient i think it's investing in you know design you know partnering with manufacturing as well as innovating and packaging great question yeah michael charlene bain and company um yeah under your leadership amd has performed a amazing turnaround and i think you you mentioned that you developed the world's best roadmap and then patiently executed for four to five years but there must be more to it that's incredibly hard right how did you keep the teams together in a competitive environment such as silicon valley where you have hiring left and right or how did you dealt with setbacks that you naturally have over such a long r d cycle well it's uh it's a good question i i think you find people who really want to do this work and that's not everyone right so when i think about um you know what uh what has really motivated um our team me i mean it's it's it's about building you know sort of the world's greatest um you know sort of microprocessors and graphics processors but it takes time and and so there it there are some people that that's not good enough for and that's okay but i think staying consistent is very very important i mean one of the the things that i've learned is you know if you change your mind every two seconds you're not going to get what you want so um you know really staying consistent with you know sort of vision strategy road map and and um you know at the end of the day though i tell my team we're only as good as our current product so we still have a lot to prove and we still have a lot a lot to do the the uh but um it's it's it's a great it's a great feeling to be able to um you know build things that make the world a better place and of course she could have just said i rock don't aren't i amazing but then i don't think i could have said that really yeah not just a little bit i don't know okay everyone should know lisa's suit lisa thank you so much you

Channel: Recode

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Id: g2A6-5_EY7w

Length: 36min 18sec (2178 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 04 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Away_Needleworker655]

God she is so passionate when she talks about amd. Very truthful when speaking about the company good or bad, so great.

Also for those who are always complaining about this company. “You can’t rush semiconductors” -Lisa Su

[u/applied_optics]

at 18:00 "...the reason why we've been growing is we chose the right markets, and we build great products..."

[u/Venkat_Sellappan]

We focus on HPC design..."..others may want to do their manufacturing.."