4 ms·

I’m not anti-CEO, I think they play an important role, but why would you interview a CEO about hard technological problems?

by refurb 2y ago

yen223 2y ago
Lisa Su is one of the (surprisingly rare) tech CEOs who comes from an engineering background.
- automatic6131 2y ago
  And so is her first cousin (once removed) Jensen Huang of Nvidia!
- drexlspivey 2y ago
  You mean like the CEOs of Intel, Nvidia, TSMC, ASML, Micron etc?
  - user_7832 2y ago
    In general it's very common for CEOs to be of a business/MBA background. Apple and Google both have this, along with tons of other companies outside the semiconductor industry.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      Apple as a hardware company needed someone who was good at operations and logistics. Tim Cook is one of the best in the business. On the other hand, I have no idea what Google’s CEOs purpose is. Google has no vision and can’t produce new products to save their lives. Google is unique among the current BigTech companies in being completely incapable of diversifying or pivoting to new market opportunities
      - MrBuddyCasino 2y ago
        Google might be the worst run unicorn. How they fell so low from that high is truly an achievement. They will continue to print money, but to think Google was once programmer Utopia and Googlers were regarded as demi-goods... inconceivable now.
  - ehhthing 2y ago
    I've noticed that it's all the chip companies that have CEOs that understand to a deep level the stuff that the company is actually doing. Compare and contrast the big software / services tech firms... It feels like companies like Intel, AMD, Nvidia and TSMC are much more about delivering good technical solutions to hard problems than software companies like Google or Microsoft that try to deliver "concepts" or "ideas". I do sometimes wonder though why decision making at a company like AMD benefits so much from having a highly competent engineer as the CEO compared to let's say Oracle...
    - tormeh 2y ago
      You don't want to hear this, but it's because what we programmers do is the easy part of software. In the hardware business the goal is well-defined (just be faster+) and all the magic is in how to do it. In software the difficult part is figuring out what the customer actually wants and then getting your organization to actually align on building that. The coding itself is easy. +There is obviously some nuance to what faster means. Faster at what? But finding some popular workloads and defining benchmarks is a lot easier than what software people have to do
      - notyourwork 2y ago
        Agreed, most hard coding problems are due to requirements thrashing and business vision churn. All things related to figuring out what the customer wants.
      - randomdata 2y ago
        Who doesn't like hearing that we (programmers) get all the fun, easy work while the other suckers in the economy have to put in the hard work for our benefit?
    - lokimedes 2y ago
      Calling all the “ad-ware” web companies “Tech companies” is what leads to this apparent contradiction. It is largely identity appropriation across the board.
    - deleted 2y ago
  - guardian5x 2y ago
    Isn't the CEO of Intel a bit crazy in regards of Leading his company through praying?
DanielHB 2y ago
She worked as a researcher in the field for decades. Moore's law only kept up because of some of the techniques she developed. > During her time at IBM,[6] Su played a "critical role"[7] in developing the "recipe"[2] to make copper connections work with semiconductor chips instead of aluminum, "solving the problem of preventing copper impurities from contaminating the devices during production".[7] Working with various IBM design teams on the details of the device, Su explained, "my specialty was not in copper, but I migrated to where the problems were".[6] The copper technology was launched in 1998,[7] resulting in new industry standards[22] and chips that were up to 20% faster than the conventional versions.[6][7]
mike_hearn 2y ago
It says in the article that he was asked by readers to do a Lisa Su interview. The headline is a little misleading, they don't talk much about technological problems. The interview is a soft light tour of her career and a few attempts to get her to talk about the present day business. Interviews with someone like Musk or Jensen are much more technically intense. Honestly this interview feels bearish for AMD. Su's performance is not good. Thompson repeatedly pushes her to reflect on past mistakes, but it's just not happening. The reason why AMD has fallen so far behind NVIDIA shine through clear as day and it doesn't look like it's going to get fixed anytime soon. Su's problem and therefore AMD's problem is that she doesn't want to think about software at all. Hardware is all she knows and she states that openly. Nor does she seem to consider this a weakness. The problem goes back to the very start of her career. The interview opens with Thompson saying she faced a choice between computer science and electronics engineering at MIT, and she picked EE because it was harder. Is that true? She's nowhere in AI due to lack of sufficient skilled devs so now would be a good time to talk up the importance of software, but no, she laughs and says sure! CS seemed easy to her because you "just" write software instead of "building things", whereas in electronics your stuff "has to work". End of answer. He tries to get a comment on the (in hindsight) not great design tradeoffs made by the Cell processor, which was hard to program for and so held back the PS3 at critical points in its lifecycle. It was a long time ago so there's been plenty of time to reflect on it, yet her only thought is "Perhaps one could say, if you look in hindsight, programmability is so important". That's it! In hindsight, programmability of your CPU is important! Then she immediately returns to hardware again, and saying how proud she was of the leaps in hardware made over the PS generations. He asks her if she'd stayed at IBM and taken over there, would she have avoided Gerstner's mistake of ignoring the cloud? Her answer is "I don’t know that I would’ve been on that path. I was a semiconductor person, I am a semiconductor person." - again, she seems to just reject on principle the idea that she would think about software, networking or systems architecture because she defines herself as an electronics person. Later Thompson tries harder to ram the point home, asking her "Where is the software piece of this? You can’t just be a hardware cowboy ... What is the reticence to software at AMD and how have you worked to change that?" and she just point-blank denies AMD has ever had a problem with software. Later she claims everything works out of the box with AMD and seems to imply that ROCm hardly matters because everyone is just programming against PyTorch anyway! The final blow comes when he asks her about ChatGPT. A pivotal moment that catapults her competitor to absolute dominance, apparently catching AMD unaware. Thompson asks her what her response was. Was she surprised? Maybe she realized this was an all hands to deck moment? What did NVIDIA do right that you missed? Answer: no, we always knew and have always been good at AI. NVIDIA did nothing different to us. The whole interview is just astonishing. Put under pressure to reflect on her market position, again and again Su retreats to outright denial and management waffle about "product arcs". It seems to be her go-to safe space. It's certainly possible she just decided to play it all as low key as possible and not say anything interesting to protect the share price, but if I was an analyst looking for signs of a quick turnaround in strategy there's no sign of that here.
JonChesterfield 2y ago
AMD was close to ruin when Lisa took over. It had completely lost the graphics and x64 wars and was limping by on low margin games consoles. Since then Epyc has broken Intel. Anyone buying Xeon's today is at credible risk of being fired over it when someone notices the power bill relative to their competition. The graphics ramp is behind Nvidia in mind share and market share. The ROCm software stack gets a lot of grief on here. Nevertheless, Nvidia lost the frontier and el cap bids and now Microsoft is running GPT4 on AMD hardware. Sounds pretty good to me given it's one product line of many. If turning a multinational semiconductor firm away from the edge of bankruptcy and into the profitable conglomerate it is today doesn't qualify as "solving a hard problem" I don't know what would. It's way beyond what I'd be capable of doing.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- tm-guimaraes 2y ago
  Major clouds have been investing in ARM alternatives. x86 is still king compatibility matters a lot. But it is not as simple as Su paints for teams of x86 chip designers to switch to arm chip designers and reach top place, specifically because fabs also matter and AMD is the player in the market with less money to pay the fabs. GPU market would be hard to recover, and reason to use AMD (for the money printing AI) is just budget. Software is not good enough, it’s understandably not in AMD’s DNA, it was simply lacking in budget as it was close to bankruptcy when CUDA started taking off. emphasis on top, ofc great designers would still design great no matter the ISA, but best and great is different
Havoc 2y ago
Much of the hard problems these days require scale and with it coordination

I’m not anti-CEO, I think they play an important role, but why would you interview a CEO about hard technological problems?

by refurb 2y ago

I’m not anti-CEO, I think they play an important role, but why would you interview a CEO about hard technological problems?

yen223 2y ago

Lisa Su is one of the (surprisingly rare) tech CEOs who comes from an engineering background.

automatic6131 2y ago
And so is her first cousin (once removed) Jensen Huang of Nvidia!
drexlspivey 2y ago
You mean like the CEOs of Intel, Nvidia, TSMC, ASML, Micron etc?
- user_7832 2y ago
  In general it's very common for CEOs to be of a business/MBA background. Apple and Google both have this, along with tons of other companies outside the semiconductor industry.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    Apple as a hardware company needed someone who was good at operations and logistics. Tim Cook is one of the best in the business. On the other hand, I have no idea what Google’s CEOs purpose is. Google has no vision and can’t produce new products to save their lives. Google is unique among the current BigTech companies in being completely incapable of diversifying or pivoting to new market opportunities
    - MrBuddyCasino 2y ago
      Google might be the worst run unicorn. How they fell so low from that high is truly an achievement. They will continue to print money, but to think Google was once programmer Utopia and Googlers were regarded as demi-goods... inconceivable now.
- ehhthing 2y ago
  I've noticed that it's all the chip companies that have CEOs that understand to a deep level the stuff that the company is actually doing. Compare and contrast the big software / services tech firms... It feels like companies like Intel, AMD, Nvidia and TSMC are much more about delivering good technical solutions to hard problems than software companies like Google or Microsoft that try to deliver "concepts" or "ideas". I do sometimes wonder though why decision making at a company like AMD benefits so much from having a highly competent engineer as the CEO compared to let's say Oracle...
  - tormeh 2y ago
    You don't want to hear this, but it's because what we programmers do is the easy part of software. In the hardware business the goal is well-defined (just be faster+) and all the magic is in how to do it. In software the difficult part is figuring out what the customer actually wants and then getting your organization to actually align on building that. The coding itself is easy. +There is obviously some nuance to what faster means. Faster at what? But finding some popular workloads and defining benchmarks is a lot easier than what software people have to do
    - notyourwork 2y ago
      Agreed, most hard coding problems are due to requirements thrashing and business vision churn. All things related to figuring out what the customer wants.
    - randomdata 2y ago
      Who doesn't like hearing that we (programmers) get all the fun, easy work while the other suckers in the economy have to put in the hard work for our benefit?
  - lokimedes 2y ago
    Calling all the “ad-ware” web companies “Tech companies” is what leads to this apparent contradiction. It is largely identity appropriation across the board.
  - deleted 2y ago
- guardian5x 2y ago
  Isn't the CEO of Intel a bit crazy in regards of Leading his company through praying?

DanielHB 2y ago

She worked as a researcher in the field for decades. Moore's law only kept up because of some of the techniques she developed. > During her time at IBM,[6] Su played a "critical role"[7] in developing the "recipe"[2] to make copper connections work with semiconductor chips instead of aluminum, "solving the problem of preventing copper impurities from contaminating the devices during production".[7] Working with various IBM design teams on the details of the device, Su explained, "my specialty was not in copper, but I migrated to where the problems were".[6] The copper technology was launched in 1998,[7] resulting in new industry standards[22] and chips that were up to 20% faster than the conventional versions.[6][7]

mike_hearn 2y ago

It says in the article that he was asked by readers to do a Lisa Su interview. The headline is a little misleading, they don't talk much about technological problems. The interview is a soft light tour of her career and a few attempts to get her to talk about the present day business. Interviews with someone like Musk or Jensen are much more technically intense. Honestly this interview feels bearish for AMD. Su's performance is not good. Thompson repeatedly pushes her to reflect on past mistakes, but it's just not happening. The reason why AMD has fallen so far behind NVIDIA shine through clear as day and it doesn't look like it's going to get fixed anytime soon. Su's problem and therefore AMD's problem is that she doesn't want to think about software at all. Hardware is all she knows and she states that openly. Nor does she seem to consider this a weakness. The problem goes back to the very start of her career. The interview opens with Thompson saying she faced a choice between computer science and electronics engineering at MIT, and she picked EE because it was harder. Is that true? She's nowhere in AI due to lack of sufficient skilled devs so now would be a good time to talk up the importance of software, but no, she laughs and says sure! CS seemed easy to her because you "just" write software instead of "building things", whereas in electronics your stuff "has to work". End of answer. He tries to get a comment on the (in hindsight) not great design tradeoffs made by the Cell processor, which was hard to program for and so held back the PS3 at critical points in its lifecycle. It was a long time ago so there's been plenty of time to reflect on it, yet her only thought is "Perhaps one could say, if you look in hindsight, programmability is so important". That's it! In hindsight, programmability of your CPU is important! Then she immediately returns to hardware again, and saying how proud she was of the leaps in hardware made over the PS generations. He asks her if she'd stayed at IBM and taken over there, would she have avoided Gerstner's mistake of ignoring the cloud? Her answer is "I don’t know that I would’ve been on that path. I was a semiconductor person, I am a semiconductor person." - again, she seems to just reject on principle the idea that she would think about software, networking or systems architecture because she defines herself as an electronics person. Later Thompson tries harder to ram the point home, asking her "Where is the software piece of this? You can’t just be a hardware cowboy ... What is the reticence to software at AMD and how have you worked to change that?" and she just point-blank denies AMD has ever had a problem with software. Later she claims everything works out of the box with AMD and seems to imply that ROCm hardly matters because everyone is just programming against PyTorch anyway! The final blow comes when he asks her about ChatGPT. A pivotal moment that catapults her competitor to absolute dominance, apparently catching AMD unaware. Thompson asks her what her response was. Was she surprised? Maybe she realized this was an all hands to deck moment? What did NVIDIA do right that you missed? Answer: no, we always knew and have always been good at AI. NVIDIA did nothing different to us. The whole interview is just astonishing. Put under pressure to reflect on her market position, again and again Su retreats to outright denial and management waffle about "product arcs". It seems to be her go-to safe space. It's certainly possible she just decided to play it all as low key as possible and not say anything interesting to protect the share price, but if I was an analyst looking for signs of a quick turnaround in strategy there's no sign of that here.

JonChesterfield 2y ago

AMD was close to ruin when Lisa took over. It had completely lost the graphics and x64 wars and was limping by on low margin games consoles. Since then Epyc has broken Intel. Anyone buying Xeon's today is at credible risk of being fired over it when someone notices the power bill relative to their competition. The graphics ramp is behind Nvidia in mind share and market share. The ROCm software stack gets a lot of grief on here. Nevertheless, Nvidia lost the frontier and el cap bids and now Microsoft is running GPT4 on AMD hardware. Sounds pretty good to me given it's one product line of many. If turning a multinational semiconductor firm away from the edge of bankruptcy and into the profitable conglomerate it is today doesn't qualify as "solving a hard problem" I don't know what would. It's way beyond what I'd be capable of doing.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tm-guimaraes 2y ago
Major clouds have been investing in ARM alternatives. x86 is still king compatibility matters a lot. But it is not as simple as Su paints for teams of x86 chip designers to switch to arm chip designers and reach top place, specifically because fabs also matter and AMD is the player in the market with less money to pay the fabs. GPU market would be hard to recover, and reason to use AMD (for the money printing AI) is just budget. Software is not good enough, it’s understandably not in AMD’s DNA, it was simply lacking in budget as it was close to bankruptcy when CUDA started taking off. emphasis on top, ofc great designers would still design great no matter the ISA, but best and great is different

Havoc 2y ago

Much of the hard problems these days require scale and with it coordination