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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 ar

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 10y ago
> 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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
    - moxious 10y ago
      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 personality type is attracted by which type of work.
      - sho_hn 10y ago
        > 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.
        tenkabuto 10y ago
        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.
- aljungberg 10y ago
  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 to confirm it's the best design or whatever. But could he talk about an alternative antenna that could have been, on the spot?
  - asdfasdfa11112 10y ago
    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.
    - aljungberg 10y ago
      I wasn't saying Tim Cook is lacking in skills. As the CEO of one of the world's most successful companies he certainly has his own unique and impressive skills. Lisa Su demonstrated an impressive skill not every CEO could pull off and I wanted to highlight that. That's all. Whether being technically adept is a requirement or not, I'd say no in general for tech companies (and I'd count Apple as one) but for a certain subset of the tech companies (AMD, Tesla) it certainly seems to help.
deepnotderp 10y ago
She's essentially correct about it. Scaling a gpu Basically amounts to more compute units.
slantyyz 10y ago
I happened to watch the Ryzen keynote video last week [1], and she's also an impressive presenter. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v44wWAOHn8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v44wWAOHn8
k__ 10y ago
Aren't the CEOs of most successful technical companies engineers?
- venomsnake 10y ago
  Depends on technical definition. Bill Gates, Carmack and Dr. Su seem to have the chops. On the other hand you have the Jobs and Zuckebergs - that could not engineer their way out of medium depth hole.
drzaiusapelord 10y ago
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.
- SaltyBackendGuy 10y ago
  > Not every company is headed by a Trump-like buffoon. First I laughed out loud, then I replaced {company -> country}... and then I cried.
saosebastiao 10y ago
She has also increased AMD's market cap by 400% since she was made CEO 3 years ago. Pretty impressive person all around.
- dave_sullivan 10y ago
  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 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.
  - saosebastiao 10y ago
    Surely none of that rise has come from their best in class APUs, open source support, or a headline stealing new architecture that is stomping on Intel benchmarks. Surely their rise is because investors in huge masses are buying them up mistakenly thinking they're nvidia.
    - dave_sullivan 10y ago
      I did chuckle reading that, because yes it sounds ridiculous at first. Buuuut... > best in class APUs Best in class because no one else wants the market, there's no profit margin there (as AMD has proven). > open source support Just because you support it don't make it good. While I think it's lame Nvidia's stuff is closed source, they have such a superior eco-system that I'm willing to overlook it (along with most of industry). If AMD could somehow get around this, by having an open source ecosystem at parity or better than nvidia, they'd be golden. But as its stands, it's not enough to make a dent. > huge masses are buying them up mistakenly thinking they're nvidia Walk that back to "investors think the semiconductor industry is slightly more commoditized than it is and they're misjudging the current landscape" and yes. > a headline stealing new architecture that is stomping on Intel benchmarks Stealing headlines and stomping on single benchmarks does not a good product make. Jury's out on if they can come up with a winning flagship product, but I'm not holding my breath. Also, they need to focus on stomping Nvidia benchmarks; Intel is not their competitor. By relative market cap, it's like saying "yahoo is google's competitor". Nvidia is AMD's "big" competitor. Current CEO is an engineer (great!) but lacks the ability to see where things are heading; Nvidia's CEO founded the company. They need Jerry Sanders' younger clone back in there or something.

baq 10y ago

> 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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
  - moxious 10y ago
    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 personality type is attracted by which type of work.
    - sho_hn 10y ago
      > 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.
      - tenkabuto 10y ago
        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.
aljungberg 10y ago
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 to confirm it's the best design or whatever. But could he talk about an alternative antenna that could have been, on the spot?
- asdfasdfa11112 10y ago
  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.
  - aljungberg 10y ago
    I wasn't saying Tim Cook is lacking in skills. As the CEO of one of the world's most successful companies he certainly has his own unique and impressive skills. Lisa Su demonstrated an impressive skill not every CEO could pull off and I wanted to highlight that. That's all. Whether being technically adept is a requirement or not, I'd say no in general for tech companies (and I'd count Apple as one) but for a certain subset of the tech companies (AMD, Tesla) it certainly seems to help.

deepnotderp 10y ago

She's essentially correct about it. Scaling a gpu Basically amounts to more compute units.

slantyyz 10y ago

I happened to watch the Ryzen keynote video last week [1], and she's also an impressive presenter. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v44wWAOHn8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v44wWAOHn8

k__ 10y ago

Aren't the CEOs of most successful technical companies engineers?

venomsnake 10y ago
Depends on technical definition. Bill Gates, Carmack and Dr. Su seem to have the chops. On the other hand you have the Jobs and Zuckebergs - that could not engineer their way out of medium depth hole.

drzaiusapelord 10y ago

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.

SaltyBackendGuy 10y ago
> Not every company is headed by a Trump-like buffoon. First I laughed out loud, then I replaced {company -> country}... and then I cried.

saosebastiao 10y ago

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

dave_sullivan 10y ago
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 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.
- saosebastiao 10y ago
  Surely none of that rise has come from their best in class APUs, open source support, or a headline stealing new architecture that is stomping on Intel benchmarks. Surely their rise is because investors in huge masses are buying them up mistakenly thinking they're nvidia.
  - dave_sullivan 10y ago
    I did chuckle reading that, because yes it sounds ridiculous at first. Buuuut... > best in class APUs Best in class because no one else wants the market, there's no profit margin there (as AMD has proven). > open source support Just because you support it don't make it good. While I think it's lame Nvidia's stuff is closed source, they have such a superior eco-system that I'm willing to overlook it (along with most of industry). If AMD could somehow get around this, by having an open source ecosystem at parity or better than nvidia, they'd be golden. But as its stands, it's not enough to make a dent. > huge masses are buying them up mistakenly thinking they're nvidia Walk that back to "investors think the semiconductor industry is slightly more commoditized than it is and they're misjudging the current landscape" and yes. > a headline stealing new architecture that is stomping on Intel benchmarks Stealing headlines and stomping on single benchmarks does not a good product make. Jury's out on if they can come up with a winning flagship product, but I'm not holding my breath. Also, they need to focus on stomping Nvidia benchmarks; Intel is not their competitor. By relative market cap, it's like saying "yahoo is google's competitor". Nvidia is AMD's "big" competitor. Current CEO is an engineer (great!) but lacks the ability to see where things are heading; Nvidia's CEO founded the company. They need Jerry Sanders' younger clone back in there or something.