It's only been a few hours since AMD announced that Dr. Lisa Su is the company's new CEO and we managed to stumble upon an official AMD staged interview with the new boss.
Corporate Vice President, Global Communications at AMD John Taylor had a nice little chat with the Su and asked a few questions about her background and, more interestingly, the company's new goals.
In the interview Lisa came off as a straight shooter and explained what she wants to do in three rather clear points. Her fist and highest priority is to build great products and use AMD leading IP, technologies, system software platform and customer relations. AMD is a product company and this won't change. If you have good products you should have a good sales and good market valuation, that is true of any industry. Lisa Su has to deal with a number of upcoming products, such as K11 and K12 chips, the Seattle ARM server series, new Radeon 20nm graphics and many other projects that should see the light of day over the next few quarters.
The second point Lisa made is that customers are really important to AMD. She stated that there should be 50 billion connected devices by 2020 and AMD wants to be in as many of them as possible. Customers and partnerships with companies can help. AMD has long standing relations with HP, Lenovo, Acer, Dell and even Apple, all key players in the consumer market.
The third point Lisa made is that she wants AMD to be simple, fast, decisive and finish products on time. Lisa points out that she has extremely high standards and she sounds like someone who knows what she wants and how to get there. She likes wining and sees AMD as a maverick and leader in the future.
Let's point the obvious - for a better part of the past decade AMD was an underdog in the CPU market and more often than not they lost crucial design wins to Nvidia in the GPU space. However, AMD was always a strong runner up with ambitions of becoming the market leader in some niches. Lisa's third focal point might be the key to AMD's future success. AMD has built great products before but it failed to bring them to market on time. Some projects, including K10 Bulldozer (Phenom) CPUs and Llano APUs didn’t pan out, as AMD was years behind on its original schedule.
Trinity and Richland as well as Kabini and Temash didn’t put that much pressure on Intel or ARM. New 2014 products such as Kaveri, Beema and Mullins did better and we can only hope that 2015 Carizzo big core and Nolan 20nm low power part can help AMD to win some market share and increase the ASPs. We like the Intel vs AMD rivalry just as much as the AMD vs Nvidia rivalry and we wish Lisa a lot of luck at her new post.
The market has changed and it's not just Intel and AMD anymore. A bunch of companies are vying for the same space, including Qualcomm, MediaTek, Nvidia, Apple, Samsung and Rockchip.
