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Interview with AMD CEO Lisa Su

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Re: Interview with AMD CEO Lisa Su

#31

Post by darksaints »

aljungberg wrote: post #3

It's pretty impressive to see a CEO being able to answer a question about CPU vs GPU power envelope targets just of the cuff. The interviewer asks why there are no CPUs targeting higher wattages, like how CPUs are less than 150W but there are 300W GPU. She says she'll need to think about it but she's pretty sure that the high parallelisation of GPUs makes them easier to scale up in terms of wattage. Granted, that ans…

She has also increased AMD's market cap by 400% since she was made CEO 3 years ago. Pretty impressive person all around.

Re: Interview with AMD CEO Lisa Su

#32

Post by astrodust »

digi_owl wrote: post #26
moxious wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you would expect it, but it's still rather atypical; most people become CEOs because of their business and political acumen, whether or not they understand the technical bits is maybe 10th priority. They say about companies that you can tell their culture from the outside by who they value and who they promote. Some engineering companies promote MBAs, and some promote engineers. Promotions and who holds high ran…

And how many MBAs are "dreamers"? Then again, i don't think Jobs was much of a dreamer either, he was just damn good at talking the talk. If anyone was a dreamer it was Woz back then. Dreaming of having his own computer, dreaming about computers improving life for everyone, etc etc etc. Jobs are all about appearance. And not just visual. He had a near pathological loathing towards fan noise for example. To the point…

> Jobs are all about appearance.

Job was all about design, and design for him went from the very simple, raw components to the final packaging and marketing. For him there was no boundary between engineering and design, between software and hardware, they were all part of the same product.

It's easy to dismiss his views as superficial, but when he wanted to have a board look a certain way, or for a case to be a certain size, he'd press for it. When there were technical problems that prevented that from happening he wanted to understand why. He wanted explanations, and he'd listen to them, then make his own judgement based on that information.

> ...but completely missed networked computers while touring Xerox PARC.

The Macintosh famously shipped with very high speed serial ports for that time, up to 230Kbaud, which was vastly faster than any modem or other serial device around in the 1980s. Why?

LocalTalk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LocalTalk

Apple may not have had Ethernet in their early computers, but they were absolutely aware about the importance of networking. Sending files from one Mac to another was as simple as plugging them together. While the Macintosh didn't have a lot of games, it did have multi-player ones over a local network long, long before Windows did.

Re: Interview with AMD CEO Lisa Su

#33

Post by AlphaSite »

digi_owl wrote: post #26
moxious wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you would expect it, but it's still rather atypical; most people become CEOs because of their business and political acumen, whether or not they understand the technical bits is maybe 10th priority. They say about companies that you can tell their culture from the outside by who they value and who they promote. Some engineering companies promote MBAs, and some promote engineers. Promotions and who holds high ran…

And how many MBAs are "dreamers"? Then again, i don't think Jobs was much of a dreamer either, he was just damn good at talking the talk. If anyone was a dreamer it was Woz back then. Dreaming of having his own computer, dreaming about computers improving life for everyone, etc etc etc. Jobs are all about appearance. And not just visual. He had a near pathological loathing towards fan noise for example. To the point…

I don't know about the time or Parc, but he was a proponent of thin terminals and having all of your data being available to you everywhere.

Re: Interview with AMD CEO Lisa Su

#34

Post by sho_hn »

moxious wrote: post #30
digi_owl wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how many MBAs are "dreamers"? Then again, i don't think Jobs was much of a dreamer either, he was just damn good at talking the talk. If anyone was a dreamer it was Woz back then. Dreaming of having his own computer, dreaming about computers improving life for everyone, etc etc etc. Jobs are all about appearance. And not just visual. He had a near pathological loathing towards fan noise for example. To the point…

An MBA doesn't teach you to be a dreamer. Neither does an engineering degree. But consider what personality types are drawn to different businesses...and I think you'll find a larger (but still small) percentage of the dreamer type within the business community than within engineering. This is not to say that there aren't also engineers who think this way, of course there are. It's more about demographics, and which…

> I think you'll find a larger (but still small) percentage of the dreamer type within the business community than within engineering.

Can you expound on that a little? It's completely contrary to my life experience, where people with business degrees are mostly system followers and ladder climbers.

Re: Interview with AMD CEO Lisa Su

#35

Post by SaltyBackendGuy »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #24
aljungberg wrote: post #3

It's pretty impressive to see a CEO being able to answer a question about CPU vs GPU power envelope targets just of the cuff. The interviewer asks why there are no CPUs targeting higher wattages, like how CPUs are less than 150W but there are 300W GPU. She says she'll need to think about it but she's pretty sure that the high parallelisation of GPUs makes them easier to scale up in terms of wattage. Granted, that ans…

In tech, CEOs are usually from engineering culture. Not every company is headed by a Trump-like buffoon. Lisa is a MIT alumn as well. I suspect she doesn't need much help answering questions here.

> Not every company is headed by a Trump-like buffoon.

First I laughed out loud, then I replaced {company -> country}... and then I cried.

Re: Interview with AMD CEO Lisa Su

#36

Post by bthallplz »

sho_hn wrote: post #34
moxious wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An MBA doesn't teach you to be a dreamer. Neither does an engineering degree. But consider what personality types are drawn to different businesses...and I think you'll find a larger (but still small) percentage of the dreamer type within the business community than within engineering. This is not to say that there aren't also engineers who think this way, of course there are. It's more about demographics, and which…

> I think you'll find a larger (but still small) percentage of the dreamer type within the business community than within engineering. Can you expound on that a little? It's completely contrary to my life experience, where people with business degrees are mostly system followers and ladder climbers.

I can't speak for moxious, but I agreed with their post because in my understanding of business and engineering and from being around people of either backgrounds, engineering seems to firstly prize hard, analytical skills and only later on considers creative solutions, while business gets around to analyzing things after considering the things within a/the bigger picture.

In terms of seeing the forest vs. the trees: My thought is that engineering might be so concerned with seeing and analyzing the trees that they do not get around to considering the forest as a whole and recognizing where no tree presently (but could eventually) resides within that forest. (I think that "recognizing where no tree presently resides" is what a dreamer type might do.)

A big issue that I see with framing business people in this light is that few of them do seem to think entrepreneurially, but that may explain why you haven't run into more dreamer types.

Re: Interview with AMD CEO Lisa Su

#37

Post by pinum »

mercutio2 wrote: post #16
overcast wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should come back, even just for a few games a year. There are some incredible experiences available these days.

I'm curious if you could elaborate on this. For the population I represent (never, ever, want a first person visual rendering, under any circumstance) but love high quality game mechanics, I have a hard time finding what I consider good games. Everybody wants to polish their fundamentally undesirable three dimensional scene.

Why the aversion to first person? I feel that something like Deus Ex would be a lot less immersive in third person.

Re: Interview with AMD CEO Lisa Su

#38

Post by SkyMarshal »

moxious wrote: post #9
baq wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering i mean, you could expect someone with that degree from MIT have at least a general idea about the technicalities of her flagship products.

Yes, you would expect it, but it's still rather atypical; most people become CEOs because of their business and political acumen, whether or not they understand the technical bits is maybe 10th priority. They say about companies that you can tell their culture from the outside by who they value and who they promote. Some engineering companies promote MBAs, and some promote engineers. Promotions and who holds high ran…

>that (b) they're probably not that great in terms of financial management & project management.

That's hardly a conclusion you can make at all. Only on the Internet could someone claim with a straight face that engineers as a rule are not also competent at financial and project management. There are millions of counterexamples. Further, engineers do on occasion go back to school to get MBA's and take a management track. Does that make them an engineer or a business person for purposes of this discussion?

Re: Interview with AMD CEO Lisa Su

#39

Post by dave_sullivan »

darksaints wrote: post #31
aljungberg wrote: post #3

It's pretty impressive to see a CEO being able to answer a question about CPU vs GPU power envelope targets just of the cuff. The interviewer asks why there are no CPUs targeting higher wattages, like how CPUs are less than 150W but there are 300W GPU. She says she'll need to think about it but she's pretty sure that the high parallelisation of GPUs makes them easier to scale up in terms of wattage. Granted, that ans…

She has also increased AMD's market cap by 400% since she was made CEO 3 years ago. Pretty impressive person all around.

As nothing material about their business has changed in 3 years, I think it's safer to say Nvidia has raised AMD's stock price 400%.

See http://imgur.com/a/ul9LE (nvidia green, amd red)

Nvidia clearly started ramping first, after which investors looked at AMD as a "cheaper alternative". Apparently a bunch of people think they're the same company, but Nvidia's recent rise is a result of their work in AI while AMD has totally missed that boat with both developers and industry.

Re: Interview with AMD CEO Lisa Su

#40

Post by asdfasdfa11112 »

aljungberg wrote: post #12
baq wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering i mean, you could expect someone with that degree from MIT have at least a general idea about the technicalities of her flagship products.

Yes absolutely, I think that's the key. It's cool to see very tech-y CEOs like this. I feel like many CEOs would defer a hypothetical question about how a product could have been made. I mean it's like asking Tim Cook about a different strength cellular antenna in the iPhone. Probably he could give a reasonable answer about what the iPhone antenna is actually like and why it's like that, and how many tests they ran t…

No, but I bet he could talk about the messy complexities of the Apple supply chain. Can technical CEOs do that?

My point isn't to get into a skills based dick measuring contest, but rather to point out that even at huge technology companies*, is being technically adept really a requirement for the job?

Another one for discussion: is Apple a "technology" company? I put forth that a company is defined by the most difficult problem they need to solve / continually solve in order to stay in business. That tells me Apple is more of a manufacturing/ marketing company than technology.

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