Su is supposed to be collecting her award from Taiwan's National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University although she has a full doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Electrical Engineering.

Her degree ceremony is on Thursday, and before that, the AMD chief will visit two important companies in Taiwan. The first of these will be a visit to the contract manufacturer Pegatron, and she will meet the firm's chairman. Pegaton is a significant company that assembles motherboards, laptops, smartphones and other personal computing equipment.

The executive's second visit will be to TSMC, but the question is what they will be rumoured to discuss. The speculation is that they will discuss a partnership for 3-nanometer chip products. If this is the case, then there will be hell to pay from the Tame Apple Press, which insists that Apple has bought everything that TSMC can produce. Jobs Mob has invested quite a bit into TSMC, although the sort of chips it will want to make are smartphone processors with lightweight technical requirements.

If AMD does want a TSMC partnership it goes against more soundly based rumours suggesting that AMD is looking to team up with Samsung on 3-nanometer chip products.

These sorts of questions might be the reason why Su’s Taiwan visit has been low-key compared to Jenson Huang’s recent trip to the island and TSMC meetings.