
Interview with AMD CEO Lisa Su - vivekchandsrc
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11177/making-amd-tick-a-very-zen-interview-with-dr-lisa-su-ceo
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aljungberg
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 answer could be wrong (I know nothing about CPU engineering),
but either way it's a really well considered one to be thought up when "put on
the spot" in an interview with a question you haven't considered ahead of
time. I'm sure that's one of the things which separate good from great in
CEOs: an understanding not only of the broad market decisions made by their
company but even the details of low level architecture decisions.

~~~
baq
> 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.

~~~
moxious
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 rank is an external
cultural signal to the world that is really hard to fake.

This cuts both ways though: if you see a company that hires and promotes
engineers, where the CEO is this technically deep, you can probably conclude
that (a) they value engineering but also that (b) they're probably not that
great in terms of financial management & project management.

They're radically different skill sets, and opportunity cost abounds. Almost
no one is awesome at everything, because there are only 24 hours in the day,
so being awesome at one thing often does mean you have some trading area where
you're weak.

Engineering companies run by MBAs are not always so bad as they sound. It
sucks as an engineer if your considerations are not always front and center,
but you get other advantages too; better strategy/insight on fundraising,
better overall management, and sometimes vision too, many engineers are too
narrowly focused on incremental improvements, and are missing the "dreamer"
component, aka the "Jobs" not the "Wozniak".

~~~
digi_owl
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 that one AppleII variant
had problems with excessive heat buckling the logicboard and unseating
components because he refused the engineers to install even the most
unobtrusive of fans.

I suspect we can see this in how he was quite hung up on the GUI but
completely missed networked computers while touring Xerox PARC.

~~~
astrodust
> 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](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.

~~~
ksec
>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.

+1 Somebody who actually understands Apple and Steve.

------
Insanity
Since I stopped gaming, I stopped following the high-end market. However, it
is nice to see that AMD is trying to get in there again, some competition is
good for the market in general.

If AMD can deliver, then Intel might have to respond with lowering prices on
their products, which I believe might be a bit overpriced now due to there no
being a real vialbe alternative.

Whatever happens, some competition is bound to be a good thing imo.

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

~~~
mercutio2
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.

~~~
izacus
Hmm, these last years were one of the best years in:

\- strategy gaming (from Deserts of Kharak, Civilization, Paradox interactive
grand strategy games, Eugen Systems games, Total War series, XCOM and more and
more)

\- RPG gaming (2D isometric RPGs are making a huge comeback with good writing
and gameplay, things like Pillars of Eternity, new Torment, Divinty and more.
3rd person Witcher 3 collected record amount of awards and with good reason.)

\- platformers (Ori, Shovel Knight), roguelikes (Darkest Dungeon, Don't
starve, Spelunky, and more)

\- experimental narrative games (Papers Please, This War of Mine, This is The
Police)

\- modern adventure games (Until Dawn, Telltales Wolf Among Us / Walking Dead
/ Game of Thrones and many more)

And those are only on PC and none of them are first person. Just like movies
go beyond just Marvel and Transformers, gaming goes way beyond just Call of
Duty and Battlefield. The AA market of smaller but still established companies
(Paradox Interactive, Relic Entertainment, Telltale and many more) build great
experiences and I don't think gaming market was ever so live and broad as it
is these years.

~~~
ashark
I'd recommend Kentucky Route Zero, too, which is finally _almost_ all out (boo
episodic release models). It's what you get when people with vision, talent,
some real book learnin', a good understanding of video games in general, and
_artistic taste_ set out to tell a story in video game form. Brain bleach for
the various trying-too-hard, one-note "art" games out there.

