The Vergecast - AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su talks new Ryzen 4000 chips and out-performing Intel

Episode Date: January 21, 2020

Editor-in-chief of The Verge Nilay Patel talks to CEO of AMD Dr Lisa Su at CES 2020 about AMD's new Ryzen laptop chips, the competition with Intel for consumer laptops, and if she is going to take on the high end of Nvidia's GPUs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hey, everyone, I'm Sam from the Vergecast. On this week's interview show, we've got Dr. Lisa Sue, the CEO of AMD. We got a chance to talk at CS. I've got to say it's one of the most interesting interviews I've done in a while. Dr. Sue is really smart, extremely focused,

has a very clear vision in where she's taking AMD. We obviously talked about AMD's announcements at CES, including the new Risen laptop chips, how the competition with Intel for Consumer Laptops is going, and whether she's going to take on the high end of NVIDIA's GPUs. We also talked about something I've been doing more of, which is when and where she actually gets work done. It's like my new favorite question.

All in all, it was a great conversation. I was really excited to talk to her. Check it out. Lisa Sue, you're the CEO of AMD. Welcome to the Vurchast. Thank you. It's great to be here. I should actually not say welcoming.

I'm in your conference room at CES. We're meeting for the first time. We are meeting for the first time. Thank you for coming on our show. We were just talking, this is the second time you've done at sort of a big press event at CES. Last year you were here. You said 2019 is going to be a big year. You obviously had a press conference.

You said the 2020 is going to be even bigger. Tell us why. Yeah, so look, we love CES. It's a great way to start the year. We get to see all of our customers and partners and press all at one time. And yes, you know, last year we were a keynote at CES. This year we did a press conference yesterday. And we do think 2020 is going to be a great year. And it's all about products for us. So we're all about, you know, launching a new set of products. And here at CES, given that it's the consumer focus. We talked a lot about our PC products and what we're bringing for both gamers and creators to the market in 2020. So yeah, we're very excited about the year. So the big news, obviously, is the new Risen 4,000 series and Athlon Mobile Chips for laptops. Walk us through this.

Yeah. So, you know, when you think about, you know, just the PC market, I mean, it's over 275 million units a year, you know, 180 million notebooks are sold. And, you know, it's really about how do make this form factor exciting and bring out new and interesting capabilities. And so we launched yesterday, Ryzen 4,000 series. It's our first 7-dometer product for the notebook form factor. It's the first 7-dometer X-86 product for the notebook form factor. It packs a tremendous amount of computing performance. So the idea is if you like to game or if you like to create or if you like to do, you know, anything productive on a PC, you want more performance. in smaller form factors, and that's what Risen 4,000 allows you to do.

So let's talk about 7 nanometer for a minute. You're saying it's the first 7 nanometer X86 part. There's obviously been a lot of movement in the industry towards 7 nanometer. Does it just get you more performance in a smaller form factor? Does it get you more performance per watt? How are you thinking about that process shift? Yeah. So, you know, the idea with technology is, you know, you have to make a set of choices, you know,

three to five years in advance. and it is what design choices you make and what manufacturing choices you make. And 7 nanometer is just the best manufacturing technology that's available in the industry today. And what that helps you with is you get to put a lot more transistors in a smaller space. And that helps you with power efficiency. That helps you with just overall raw performance that you can put in, you know, given a silicon area. And what that translates into for the user is just more bang for your. your book. So if you're going to buy a thousand dollar laptop, you want it to have the most computing

horsepower you can have, and seven nanometer gives you more. So that process shift is something obviously your competitor, Intel has not been able to do for some time. They run obviously an integrated company where they do their own fabrication. AMD is now a fabless company. Are you thinking of that as a like a core strategic advantage for AMD that you're farming at manufacturing elsewhere? Are you working with the fabs closely to get to seven nanometer in that way? Well, for our, us, it's really about knowing what we're really, really good at. And our core competency is in design. And, you know, designing great products, whether you're talking about PC products or gaming products or server products, we partner on the manufacturing. We actually think that's an advantage.

Because if you think about it, when you use, you know, sort of a leading edge foundry, they're actually, you know, working for the industry. And so, you know, things like ramping yields and getting to the best cost points and, you know, really, you know, figuring out the kinks in a technology, we actually get to do it as an industry. And so, you know, we have, we're early in 7 nanometer. We've had a lot of products. You know, I mentioned yesterday in our press conference that we have, you know, about 20 products, both in production and development, which is a lot for a given technology node. But it's going really well, and so we're pleased with it. So you on, say, yesterday, referred to the performance jump of the 4,000 series is disruptive performance, which is a great

phrase that I like. It implies that I will suddenly use Excel faster than everything. Everything's going to change when I look at Google Docs. But the graph you showed is a pretty huge jump. Inside the 51 envelope of these ships, I think you quoted 59% in GPU performance, 159% improvement. It's faster in the Ice Lake, up to 50% faster in some of the measures that you were quoting. How's the battery life when you're looking at performance jump this way? The battery life will be very, very good. The battery life will be very good. This is by far the number one question.

And you know what? Our goal is to make sure that you see it. And, you know, as the systems come out over, you know, the next number of weeks, you'll see some of those systems and measure the battery life for yourself. In our test systems, very good. And we call it all day battery life. All day battery life, meaning, you know, we've seen cases up to 18 hours. Now, you know, obviously you have to see it in your application.

but we feel very good about the battery life. So you announced, I think, on stage yesterday, Lenovo Yoga Slim 7, which we got to see. There's over 100 laptops coming out with these processors this year. How is that conversation going in the sort of the consumer laptop space? Yeah, you know, it's one of those things. You know, we've been on a journey with, you know, the Risen brand and the Risen products in PCs.

If you look in the desktop, for example, you know, we introduced the first generation Risen, people were happy. You know, second generation Risen, they felt, you know, you've been better about the product. With the third generation of Risen and mobile, we've just gotten tremendous traction in the desktop space. And we're looking at something similar in the mobile space, you know, which is, you know, our current, our second generation, you know, Verizon Mobile is a very, very good product. And we've sold, you know, quite a bit of them. We've gained nice share throughout the last, actually throughout the last seven or eight quarters. Third generation, Verizon Mobile is a step function.

I mean, it's just a lot, lot better. And so we're very excited to see what 2020 brings. It also means that our partnerships with the OEMs have gotten deeper, and so they're designing more for our product. And, you know, you saw that in some of the unique design that Azuse has done around our Ryzen 4,000 series. You mentioned Lenovo. Dell has a nice design.

There are many designs that will come out over the next couple of months. So we're very excited about it. And, you know, I think the partnerships with our OEMs are the best they've ever been. When do you make the sale of a chip? I guess that's like a, it's like a 101 question. But for the audience, you're now seeing the chip now. Presumably all those partners have already seen the chip of their design around it. That's right. You start about a year in advance.

So when you say you're going to see more or the ramp is getting faster, you're not actually talking about the third generation, talking about the fourth generation? We're talking about the rise in 4,000 series. Okay. Yeah, so what you're seeing with, you know, sort of 100 plus platforms, that all of that work was done sort of last year. And, you know, it's with sampling, with doing a lot of optimization. There's, you know, there's a lot of work that's done to bring a new system to market.

So, yeah, we're pretty excited about what 2020 has to offer. So when you're out in the market, particularly sort of on the premium laptop end, or Intel has just been dominant and now you've got a big performance advantage. Are you seeing vendors say, actually, we're going to make the change? Because you already know for this year, right? We have seen a lot of good momentum and I'm excited about that momentum. You know, when you look at it, you know, like I said, it's really a journey about getting people familiar with what AMD is capable of. And, you know, technology is one of those things that, you know, you have to see and touch and feel. So yes, I, I, feel very optimistic about what we can do in the notebook space. And overall, you know, the way we view

it is, you know, if you look at the AMD offerings today, you know, we are, you know, it's sort of top to bottom. And that's really, really important, which is you have entry level capability, which is important because you're reaching a large number of users. And then you also have, you know, the premium level designs, which are really important. And that, you know, and that, goes across consumer and commercial. So, you know, our view is, you know, we believe we can address the large portion of the market. And, you know, that's why, you know, this is such an important launch for us. Do you need to do consumer marketing to raise awareness and sort of that zone of very popular entry-level laptops where you have now better performance? We certainly do

need to do consumer marketing. And we do that a lot through our partners and through the retailers. And so, you know, partnerships with, you know, people like Best Buy and JD.com and Dixons. And I think, you know, the more, you know, it's sort of like success begets success. And so the, you know, the more sales there are, the more people know about the Risen brand, the more people who are building systems with Risen, I think that that also promotes the brand quite a bit. So this is a question straight from Twitter, which is, are you committing to better support for the 4,000 series of drivers for longer than in the past? I would say than longer than in the past is an open-ended question.

But I think what you can definitely say is we are committed to very strong ecosystem support. So the drivers will be supported. Actually, even last year, we started offering our day one drivers that we use for discrete graphics cards also for our notebook processors. And that is what the ecosystem wants, right? They want more access to the leading edge of the capabilities. And so, yes, we are very committed to doing that. You're talking a lot about consumer laptops. You're talking about a CPU performance and laptops.

Is that you're taking shares that market is growing for you? Or is that a market that you think that this kind of persists for a long time, the sort of classic Windows laptop? You know, we think there's a huge market for Windows laptops. And, you know, when we think... There's like one Linux laptop owner right now is, like, freaking out. And they're, like, pulled over in their car. They're like sending email.

Well, look, we support Chrome and we support Linux. And so it's not a matter of we're not supporting the other operating systems. But there's a large market out there for Windows. And, you know, our partnership with Microsoft has just gotten stronger over the last couple of years. Is their hardware business help that? We just had Panos on the show when he was announcing the service devices. Yeah, yeah. Panos is a great friend.

I do think the relationship with Surface has. been a key part of, you know, when you look across the AMD relationship with Microsoft, it goes across the Xbox lineup, now Surface, as well as the cloud, you know, Azure, and all the stuff with Windows. And it's a very deep partnership. So yes, we're, you know, very excited about that. We're excited about the work that we've done with Surface. And, you know, we think it'll just get better with time. Has that actually changed the dynamic of sort of what you would classically call like the Wintel ecosystem, right, where they're now making their hardware, they're running up against challenges. You are a formidable competitor. They can help them

solve some of their design problems. Has that actually provided an entry point for AMD to come in and say, hey, we actually can do some stuff? Why doesn't Windows support this better? And then the ecosystem can grow. I think, you know, again, it's back to this notion of success. You build on success. And I think the fact that we have gained share, the fact that the Ryzen brand has Gainshare, the fact that the products are really, really good. And Microsoft also is so good at system design and integration that together we've been able to build some very special things. So that's the CPU side. Well, actually, one more question on CPUs. How much longer do you think sort of the seven nanometer run is? Right? I mean, this is like the big generational shift.

We're seeing it. It already sort of happened in mobile. You're first out the gate with x86. How much longer do you think this particular run has? Well, seven nanometers a big node. So, you know, you can expect that we're going to be on seven nanometer for quite some time, but we're always looking at what's next as well. So at the appropriate time, we'll transition to the next generation. But seven nanometers, big node with a lot of capabilities. So you're going to see it for a while. So you think the future of sort of big performance jumps is tied to process improvements? I think process improvements is a piece of it. It's not the biggest piece of it, but it's a time. an important piece of it. And so my view is that with the process node transition, you want to be

you know, at sort of the leading edge, like within, you know, let's call it, you know, six months or so. And that gives you the foundation to build on top of it and to build great design and great product and great systems on top of it. And so, you know, I view it as important, but not the determining factor. So that is sort of the CPU side. You mentioned Microsoft the Xbox a little bit. You've obviously you're growing share in sort of the classic laptop chip with Risen. You've got these really big sort of integrated wins with the PS5. We saw the logo yesterday, amazing press event to see the PS5 logo. I really enjoyed.

It looks like the PS4 logo. I don't know if you saw it. They changed the 4-105. You've obviously got the Xbox. Onstage yesterday, you showed off Apple's sort of Mac Pro launch event. You've got chips in there. Is there a crossover between how you're designing those integrated products or working those integrated products and what you're doing with the more traditional side, do they feed off each other,

or are they totally separate? No, they're very integrated. I mean, the way to think about it is, you know, we invest in the foundation. And graphics is a very, very important foundation for us. You know, under the radion umbrella, you know, with our new architecture, our DNA, that is, you know, going to be core to our PC business, our discrete graphics, sort of add-in-board business, as well as to these big partnerships. as you state, with Microsoft and Sony and Apple and others.

And, you know, I view it as just, you know, you can take that same technology and bring it across, you know, many different markets. So we're very excited about graphics. You know, gaming is core to our heart. And, you know, we're excited for the consoles that come out later this year. And we're also excited for our own discrete graphics trips that will come out. You know, yesterday we launched the 5600 XT for 1080P. and I know that, you know, I got a few Twitter comments about, hey, where's the Big Navi?

And my comment is, look, Big Navi is coming. So, you know, we'll have, you know, certainly a high-end, you know, chip in the discrete graphics area as well. And it's all part of the portfolio. So when I put out the call for questions, number one question. Big Navi? Yeah, well, maybe not so specific. But all this focus on 1080P and 440P gaming, we're at CS. There's like 8K TVs everywhere you go.

You actually talked about AKNC yesterday. Are you thinking about the high end of the graphics market? Why the focus on 1080P gaming right now? Well, I think the way to think about it is when we put together a roadmap, you know, we put it together in a very deliberate way. And so I think we have a great roadmap around 1080P 1440 with our 55, 56, 5700 series. And they've gone very well. That was the first incarnation.

of our DNA architecture. And you should expect that things only get better with time. And that's the way it was with our CPU roadmap. And that's the way it will be with our GPU roadmap as well. And so, yeah, you'll see larger graphics capability from us as we go through the year. And we're excited about that. But that's kind of, I don't want to say, it's sort of the inverse of how you would traditionally think about it.

You traditionally start with the highest horsepower part and it comes down. You're talking, we're at 10. and we're going to go up. I don't know if there's a traditionally in any particular, in any particular market. I mean, there are a lot of people who are still gaming in 1080. Yeah, but they're making a huge mistake. They should be buying high-end graphics cards room. Well, you know, I hope they do.

I hope they do. It's all a matter of time, right? It's all a matter of time. I mean, so on the graphics side, you also announced Free Sync Premium. I actually think variable refresh rate is sort of an underappreciated technology. On the gaming side, people obviously like it and care about it. But across sort of every display, I would like to see more variable refresh rate. What's your thought on the state of that market?

Is it going to become a more mainstream consumer offering that your graphics cards enable? Is it something you see demand for? Is it something that you lit up and it's there? Yeah, no, it's a great point. I think I do agree with you. I think the display environment is underappreciated. I think we've been focused on freesync across all price points for a while. and we expect it to become even more prevalent.

So we have over 1,000 displays now that support-free sync and we'll continue to build that ecosystem. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tools, I really put my all into this. One tool that can help grow your sprouting business to new heights is Shopify. Millions of businesses around the world rely on Shopify for e-commerce.

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Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash vergecast. Go to Shopify.com slash vergecast. That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. Support for the show comes from Grammarly. You don't need reminding that the world moves fast. But work today requires clear communication, and when every message counts, sounding rushed or generic can mean getting lost in the shuffle. Gramerly gives you one place to think, write, and finish your work where you already write,

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They're used a lot for sort of off-the-shelf machine learning, off-the-shelf AI. You don't have that focus quite with as much emphasis, I would say. Is that something you're thinking about as well? Or do you just not have the parts yet? Yeah. So we have actually a number of machine learning AI parts as well. So last year we launched what we called the MI50 and MI60. I think it's fair to say that our machine learning and AI efforts are more targeted at large cloud customers with the ideas.

with the idea that they will bring that technology, you know, into the industry. But, you know, for those who want to use them, I think they're certainly, you know, it's certainly an important market and you'll see more parts from us in the future. But like the sort of like TensorFlows of the world are not OpenCL, right? They're... Well, actually, you can run TensorFlow on AMD on GPUs today. And you think you have the performance? I think the performance is competitive. I think the performance will get better. And, you know, again, I think the, the, the, idea of, you know, sort of where we focus. So we are, you know, very much on the, you know, partnering with, you know, large customers to get the technology out there. And, you know, that's our, you know, that's our view in the data center GPU space. So if you look at, you know, some of the large winds that we've announced, like, for example, Google Stadia is using

AMD GPUs. And, you know, that's, you know, very much, you know, based on some of our cloud gaming efforts. You know, we're also working, as I said, on TensorFlow. We're working with some of the other large cloud players as well with enabling our machine learning capabilities. Do you think that's a market at the scale of the opportunity in consumer laptops or in high-end gaming? I do think it is a market that will continue to grow over time and is one of the larger growth markets. I would say it's still, you know, relatively early, you know, sort of in its incarnation, but yes, I do think it's a large market. Because when you talk about AMD and high-performance computing, that's so often what people think about is massive machine learning AI deployments.

Yes. But you don't think it's mature enough for you guys to enter yet? Oh, no, no. I wouldn't say that. I would just say that our entry point is with large customers. Like, for example, if you look at some of the large wins that we have, for example, we're in the Oak Ridge National Lab supercomputer. So their next generation supercomputer that comes out in 2021 is using.

a combination of AMD CPUs and AMD GPUs. That's as high performance computing as you can get, right? From a supercomputing standpoint, I think the horsepower there is key. Those are examples of sort of large investments that we've made. They're not exactly consumer investments yet, but they're examples of where we're taking sort of the best that we have in CPUs and the best that we have in GPUs and putting them into a system that just has tremendous horsepower.

So I want to sort of on that note, just take the long view here. Like these are the chips you announced yesterday. There's going to be laptops tomorrow. On sort of the 10-year arc, do you still think people are going to need this amount of local processing performance in their lives? It's all going to live in a cloud. Like, what is a vendor of chips? What keeps you up at night about where the industry might be going? So I think what's exciting for us is that people will continually need more horsepower.

And they will need it in both places. They will need it in the cloud, sort of in the back office, because there's a lot of processing that you can do there. But we are all inherently impatient people, and we all like, you know, sort of our desk side support. And if you really think about that, you know, what you need, you know, sort of, you know, whether you call it the edge or whether you call it, you know, sort of local, you want more capability because, you know, if the network is down, if there's latency in the network, if

there's ABC, you still want to have that computing capability, you know, personally as well. And so I think you're going to see growth on both sides. We're putting a huge focus into the data center because we think that there's actually a lot of opportunity as the workloads change that you will see, you know, significantly new technology in the data center. But, you know, like I said, you know, this week is CES. So we talked about what you'll see on the consumer side. But both sides are going to need a lot of computing.

So as a tech person, I think there's plenty for us to do for the next 10 years. So that kind of brings me to where consumers are now. We have not really talked about mobility outside of laptops. Are you interested in making more mobile processors? Are you interested in doing smartphone chips? Have you ever thought about taking the arm license and just going for it? Yeah, look, we've certainly thought about all those things. But one of the things that I'm very clear about at AMD is, look, let's be clear

at what we're good at. We're just very, very good at high performance things. And the more compute you need, the better our value proposition. We're not a smartphone company. We're not a smartphone company. I think there are other people who are better at that. We do partner. Like, for example, we partner with Samsung on their mobile phones, and they're using our graphics or they're, you know, we're co-developing some graphics for the mobile phone market. But I don't think you're going to see AMD chips in mobile phones anytime soon. And I think that's good. You know, we're into big things.

And we'll go from laptop, you know, to supercomputer. That's our range. But let me like sketch out a scenario. Let's say there is like a dominant operating system in the world. And it was tied to a single chipmaker who had kind of hit a performance ceiling. And a challenger brand could come in with a better performance part. It worked a little bit better that enabled new form factors. That would seem like an opportunity for AMD just historically.

and right now you kind of have the exact same thing happening with Android and Qualcomm, right? You don't see that as the same kind of opportunity? You know, I look at there's a confluence of events that are important and you need the market to be good, no question. And the market is important. And that's why we're so excited about our markets. You know, our markets, whether you talk about PCs or gaming or data center,

we think, you know, add that up, that's over $75 billion of market. So there's plenty of market to go out. after. You add, you know, smartphones, that's another, you know, many, many billions. So there's a lot to go after. But you also have to be, you know, all technology is not created equal, right? So to make, you know, large x86, you know, chips that will do, you know, terraflops and exaflops of computing is different from, you know, doing an IoT chip or doing, you know, something like that. And so I think you need both market and then you need, you know, sort of, you know, real technology expertise. And like I said, we're very confident in our roadmap around high performance computing,

and there's plenty of market for us to go after. Yeah. So on that side of things, you have recently led what I would call a pretty furious sprint, just overtake Intel and CPU performance especially. How did you make the changes to the company to accomplish that? I'm always interested, particularly when I talk to CEOs about, quite honestly, how you manage change and how you manage goals like that? So I think, you know, for us it's really a couple things. I think it's clear focus on what we're trying to do. So we said on the CPU performance side, we knew it would take us at least five years. Where did you say that? Obviously in public, but in what, did you like have an all hands meeting with everybody at AMD and be like, here's what we are now all going to say together? Did you have

a smaller meeting where you say we're pivoting the company? How do you implement a decision or a vision like that? what's, I think, all of the above. So you do it in, you know, small forms with, you know, sort of the inner circle. You do it in large forms. You do it in board meetings. You do it in all kinds of forms. But the key is to put your money where your mouth is, right? And so the investments have to be very focused.

And our investments have been very focused on CPU leadership and GPU leadership. and people can see that. And the other thing is you also have to realize that, you know, good technology takes time. And so, you know, Zen 1 was a very, very important first step. You know, Zen 2 is amazing. And we're extremely proud of where Zen 2, you know, sits in the market today. And then, you know, we're working on Zen 3 and Zen 4 and Zen 5. And so it's a journey.

Chipmakers, I think, are different from the companies. I usually talk to in that your lead times are way longer, your bets are bigger, your risks are higher, you have to work on a much longer time frame. Where do you sort of manage the risk? Where do you say, we're actually going to go left and set a right? And we might get it wrong, but we think we've, we think over the course of the three years of this particular development that we're actually going to get it right, or we think we have opportunities to iterate as we go. Yes, they are definitely three to five year investments. And we decide, way ahead of time, hey, when are we going to use 7 nanometer?

And what is the first chip? And what is the second chip? And what is the third, and the fourth and the fifth? And those decisions are bets. And so you have to, you know, you have to be, you don't have to be right all the time, but you have to be right, you know, a good portion of the time. I think for tech companies, it's you have to make long bets, but then you have to check very often and make sure that you're still on track for what you

said you were going to do. And there are times that we have to make changes and make pivots. You know, like, hey, that idea was a really good idea, but, you know, it's taking too long, or it's costing too much area, or we're not getting the performance, and we have to pull back on that idea. And, you know, that happens from time to time. So we make really long roadmaps, but we check very often. Where does that happen for you to see it? Like, if a problem of that scale gets to you, it's like a, I'm assuming it's a big problem. Where are the checks sort of, I mean, NAMD is a big company.

Where do you see the sort of invention at the lower scales versus what comes to you? I like to believe that we're a big company, but that we operate like a medium-sized company. Let's put it that way. You're like, you're not going to lie to me and say you're a startup. No, no, no, no. Many big companies will be like, we're a startup. No, we're not a startup, but we're not like huge. And I got to tell you, I do get frequent updates on the most important products.

That's great. And that's, you know, that's the way it should be. And so do you think, like, when you're setting out the big goals, is that coming from, sort of the mid-tier of your engineering management? Is it coming from you waking up one day and saying, we're going in this way and we're just implementing it? How does that work? Yeah, so we have a group of people that include sort of our most senior technical people.

So, you know, we call them corporate fellows. We have about six of them. And, you know, they're specialists in their areas. So it's people like, you know, Mike Clark, who's ahead of our CPU architecture, you know, Mike Mantor, who, you know, Mike Mantor, who's the head of our GPU architecture, you know, Sam Navsinger who runs power. And these are like really, really smart guys. And they sort of look at a lot of the input of what's happening in the industry and what's

happening in our roadmap. And, you know, they make a set of recommendations. And then, you know, at, you know, with myself and some of our staff, we really do look at the roadmaps, you know, very often and make sure that we're making the right bets at the right time. So you're describing a group of people who make decisions. How is sort of AMD broadly organized around that stuff? Like I'm always interested in how companies are managed from that perspective. Yeah.

So, again, we have sort of, you know, long lead time IP. Think of it as the core CPU IP is run by our CTO, Mark Papermaster. Their goal in life is to make sure that, you know, for the next five plus years, that roadmap is extraordinarily competitive. and that is their goal in life. And there's, you know, thousands of people underneath that, but there's no question that that's, you know, between Mark and Mike and that team, they have to do that.

And then on the GPU side, we have someone named David Wang who does the exact same thing. His job is to make sure that the GPU roadmap is extremely competitive. And so those are the foundations. And then we have product people who decide, okay, well, let me take, you know, when do I take Zen 2 into the products? When do I take Zen 3? You know, those types of things on the product side. Which of those two sides, which has the most surprises?

My guess is that the GPU team has dealt with more surprises of the past few years in terms of where the market's going versus the CPU team. But I'm curious. I think it is true that the GPU side has had the market moves a little bit quicker. When you look at the requirements that come in gaming, whether you're talking about PCs, or consoles or cloud, or you're talking about machine learning, I think there's been just an explosion of requirements on the GPU side. But that being the case, I think, you know, both teams are very clear on what their goals are and they're very focused on what their goals are.

All right. So last set of questions, my New Year's resolution, 2020, Vergecast, I'm going to ask everybody this question. Because it is the hardest question. I don't have an answer for it. When do you actually do work? because hopefully someone can tell me and then I can start to. When do I actually do work? Like here at CS, you've got 10,000 meetings.

At some point, you have to like sit down and write an email and communicate or... I have to say I do quite a bit of work in the morning. You know, before like, you know, for example, this morning, I was up at 4 a.m. You know, it's easy, right? Yeah, this is a specific time. I live in Austin, so it was easy to be up at 4 a.m. But, yeah, there's a lot of think time. You know, that's what planes are for.

That's what, you know, downtime is for. I was told planes are for watching bad movies. No. No, no, no, no, no. Plains are for thinking. Okay. Planes are for thinking. I'm very impressed.

I cannot do anything on a plane except stare at the window and maybe watch a movie. So you're basically finding in between times. Yes, yes. I think, look, we are, you know, it's a very fast-paced world that we live in. And, you know, every minute of the day, something changes. But I have to say, that's what makes it exciting. Yeah. That's what makes it exciting.

You're not one of these CEOs that needs to like spend 48 hours in complete silence before you issue a world-changing memo. That is not me. I've met a lot of those. Have you really? Yeah, I think particularly software CEOs, they want to spend a lot of time just like walking and talking. No. And then they want to issue a memo about how Yahoo's going to take over the world or something. No, no.

Look, I wake up every morning wondering, hey, what's in the news? today what's going on because we are in a very you know although we're talking about five-year roadmaps a lot happens on a daily basis and it's all about you know making sure that we are responsive and doing the right things and on the right path and every minute counts do you think of yourself as more i mean that way you're describing i've asked this question a lot so i'm like very curious how people think of this stuff that is sort of a reactive posture but amd is obviously a sort of forward-thinking company how do you think of that split yeah i don't i don't view it as reactive i view it as responsive. Okay. And, you know, one of the things that I think is most important is that

you don't, I learned very early that if you're too inwardly focused, that's where you lose. Because, yes, you can set out a five-year roadmap, but if the world has changed, you know, it's not the right roadmap. And so I think it is really, you know, about, you know, for me, it's about technology, it's about our customers, it's about the market, and ensuring that we're very responsive to what we see is happening on a daily basis. So you wake up, you're focused. I guess when I think of work, work is like a lot of things, a lot of people. Some people think of going to meetings as work.

I mean like you're actually alone in thinking in like writing or reading. That's the morning for you. Yeah, yeah. And I do think work is meetings too. Yeah. I'm not a huge fan of meetings. Well, no, no. But, you know, you realize that, you know, people need to formulate their thoughts.

thoughts. And so when you have, you know, sort of the idea that you have, you know, people coming together and saying, hey, this is what we want to do. Yeah. We actually spend time saying, hey, does that make sense? And so, yes, there's, there's a lot of alone time, but there's also a lot of making sure that the team feels that, you know, we're in this together. Yeah. Okay. Last question. You're obviously here. He said the last question was the last question. Well, but I want to end on AMD, not just the value of alone time. Okay. That's why you're the CEO. That's why you run a good meeting. You're like, this meeting was over five minutes ago. No, but in terms of AMD, broadly, obviously the big consumer push here, what do you think people should be looking

for across the next five from AMD? Where do you think the big focus is beyond just iterating the generations of process you have now? You know, I think we are very focused on being a mover of the technology landscape. And I know that that sounds very lofty. But, you know, the way I look at it is there are lots of decisions to be made in tech, and we are a big player in that. And so the fact that, you know, let's call it, we're in high-performance CPUs and high-performance GPUs, and they can be in the largest supercomputers in the world, I think that's a place that we feel very good about. And so, you know, we want to be driving that direction of technology over the next five years.

Great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time today. It was really great. Super. Thank you. Okay. My thanks to Lisa Sue, CEO of AMD, for being on the show. I love your feedback on these interviews.

You can tweet at me. I'm at Reckless. Tell me what you want to hear about, who you want me to talk to. That's always really good information for me to get. We'll see you later this week with the chat show. And again on Tuesday with the interview show, we're back at it. 2020's here. Let's do it.