(soft music with zapping sound)
Hello, and welcome to The Six Five Summit.
I'm Shelly Kramer,
one of the founding partners of Futurum Research
and on behalf of my team at Futurum
and the team at Moor Insights & Strategy,
we're glad to have you.
In this fireside chat discussion,
we've got Moor Insight's, Patrick Moorhead
sitting down with Dr. Lisa Su,
the CEO and President of AMD.
Their conversation revolves around innovation
and transformation in the enterprise.
Since taking the helm at AMD,
Dr. Su's accomplishments have been impressive.
In fact, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say,
they're really nothing short of legendary.
But don't take my word for it.
Let's go see what Dr. Su has to say.
Hi, Lisa, welcome to The Six Five Summit,
and helping us officially open the show.
I really do appreciate you joining us today.
Hey, Pat, it's great to be here with you.
I'm really happy that you and Daniel are having this,
and I'm really looking forward to it.
Thanks.
And I know it probably be better to do this face to face,
but we all know what's going on,
and that's just not a possibility.
Let's dive in.
Digital transformation, I love this buzzword,
it's been here for about five years.
I'm curious,
you have a lot of interaction with enterprise customers
and partners.
What do you hear from them right now?
You know, Pat.
I think none of us would have expected that 2020
is what it is.
And the fact that we have had this unprecedented time
and everything going on.
I would say that it's really been really interesting
as we spend time with customers and partners.
What you find is people are really now understanding
how core digital transformation is to the business.
It is essential to everything that we do,
and it gives you a real appreciation of the technology
that we're working on and what we can do with it.
And whether it's work from home or schooling from home,
or it's how do you connect?
Frankly, I connect with more customers now
than I did last year,
just because I've cut out all that travel
and it's become acceptable for us to do video chats
and conversation.
I think that the fact is digital transformation
is here to stay.
The pandemic will come and go,
but the abilities that we have,
the efficiencies that we gain,
the capabilities that brought in
are what makes it so, so important to everyone.
Really.
Yeah, it's incredible.
And it's really on three sides,
you have the manufacturers making rapid changes,
hardware, software, and services.
You have the end users who had to get used to this as well.
And then you had IT and the businesses all having to move
at the same time.
It it's been incredible.
I think we all have personal examples.
And we talked a little bit about this before
of how to pivot from working, learning.
And I like to add governing from home
has caused huge shifts in, in behavior.
Not all of them easy.
I'm curious, what are your thoughts
on those that are fleeting, let's say in the here and now,
and those that stick after, let's say,
we found a vaccine and people are comfortable,
and safe to go out.
What is the new normal?
Yeah. So look, I've been incredibly impressed
at what frankly all of us have been able to do.
If I just take AMD for example,
we have about 12,000 people,
and we pivoted, like many of our tech peers,
to work from home for about 90 plus percent
of our workforce in like a minute.
And the fact is the products are still getting built
and we're making tremendous progress on the roadmap,
we're spending a lot of time with customers,
we're spending a lot of time with partners,
and I think that's true for a lot of tech,
we've really been able to move very, very quickly
to let's call it the current normal.
Now, that being said, Pat,
I'm a big fan of in-person activities.
I like seeing people, I like spending time with people.
I think there is a desire for us to return
to more of a balance.
So yeah, we may not travel as much as we did in the past,
but I'd love to see you in person,
and we're probably like, whatever,
five miles away from each other,
but we're doing it on video.
And I think what it has put a premium on
is the relationships and trust
that you have built over time,
because in this sense we are all truly in it together.
I can't tell you how many new relationships as CEO's
that we've built.
There are lots of opportunities for us to get together,
whether it's on Zoom calls or Microsoft teams
or WebEx,
but there's a lot of opportunities for us to come together
and really solve some of the larger systemic issues.
And so one of the things that I like to think about
is the better normal.
We keep talking about the new normal,
let's talk about the better normal,
which has perhaps a little bit more balanced
than we had a year ago.
I 100% agree with the assessment.
And it's funny early on I really was thinking personally
that this new normal, man,
we're just not going to be getting on airplanes.
Then over time, the amount of time,
not actually seeing people face to face
and the strain on relationships,
either building them or improving them, reality hit.
And I agree with you.
I think there's going to be just more flexibility here,
a little bit more of a blend.
If you look at governments,
who really never governed from home,
that's the biggest difference.
I think more employees will get choices,
but I appreciate those comments.
I'd like to shift to high performance computing,
really been in the limelight lately, if nothing else,
for scientific and medical reasons,
either looking through a cure
or helping people get better.
But high performance computing
is more than just for medical research.
It's really very valuable to CIOs as well.
Many of those who are on this call today,
can you talk a little bit about the applicability
of high performance computing for them?
Yeah, absolutely.
High performance computing is sort of our mantra at AMD,
it's all about how do we push the envelope
of what computing can do for you.
And at the very, very high end,
it is the super computers that are being used
to help with COVID-19 research
or a whole bunch of other things.
But when you take the technology
that you develop for high performance computing,
that's high performance processors and the interconnects
and all of that stuff,
what you're able to do is really address a whole number
of workloads.
And again, from the very complex
stimulation-based workloads,
whether it's for finance or for research to,
Pat, I know you and I've talked about this a lot
this whole hybrid world that's existing.
So the idea that many businesses
will have both their on-prem computing,
as well as what they can do in the cloud.
And the cloud variety that you have now that's optimized
for different workloads allows you to do a whole bunch
of different things.
I think the main point is one would be surprised
at how much computing has changed
and how much we can do now,
I can tell you, even in our own case,
we were very much an on-prem type company.
Thinking that, hey, when we're doing our products,
we want to do everything in house,
but the cloud environment
has proven to be very, very flexible for us
and for many of our customers.
Yeah, it is interesting.
And I'm sure you've seen this over the last 30 years.
It always seems this,
we're looking for the killer app
and then we find it
and then we questioned the value of hardware
and we hate things like machine learning
and big data analytics.
I haven't heard anybody ask why I need all this performance
for about five years.
And I think that that's great for the industry,
but I think it's great for enterprise outcomes as well,
because we're just smarter
and it's not just the highest end elite enterprises.
It's everybody, it's been democratized.
And I have to give you a lot of kudos,
Lisa for democratizing for so many people,
high performance computing.
Well, I appreciate that, Pat.
I think we've all done a big part in it,
but the most interesting thing, I think to your point,
is not only are people saying, what am I...
They're not asking
what are you going to use performance for?
They're actually saying, I need more.
You mentioned machine learning and big data analytics.
I think the feeling is we're still at the very infancy
of what we can do with those technologies
and we're all learning in the process.
Yeah, there's just going to be a ton of opportunity
for everybody out there.
And speaking about the future,
let's pivot to the future here a second
as the CEO of a major semiconductor company,
you have to make bets on a three to five,
actually architecturally, probably on a seven year basis,
but you're also filling fabs
which have these massive capital expenditures
with your partners.
What advice would you give to IT leaders
about navigating the uncertainty of our current situation?
Yeah, that's a great point.
I think all of us have thought
a lot about short term versus long term.
I will say though,
fundamentally for all of us in tech
and specifically when you're thinking about
what you're trying to accomplish over the next
three to five years,
we must think at the foundational level.
Fundamental level of what do you need,
what problems you're trying to solve,
how do we affect those with our partners,
like for us, it's about how do we really
stay above the performance curve
so that we're giving people more performance per dollar
with each generation.
And those are things that are not temporal.
You don't optimize over the next month or two,
you really make decisions on,
Hey, what's the next node process technology,
what's the next node architecture,
who are the partners that you want to partner with
and develop a longterm roadmap?
I think those things are really key.
And the fact is the closer we work together,
in different disciplines.
So Silicon systems, software end user,
the better we're going to be able to affect those outcomes.
And so I'm a big fan of deep, deep partnerships,
talking about, hey, what problems are you trying to solve?
If you're in the financial industry
or if you're trying to solve a difficult technical problem.
And we can think about how we can help you solve those
with innovations in Silicon and systems.
I think those are very sage words of advice, Lisa,
and I think with an incremental level of credibility,
as I've watched you lead AMD over the past few years
and super impressed,
you've been on a meteoric rise on all fronts.
And with that said,
what advice would you give other leaders of companies
looking to drive the highest degree of excellence
for their organizations or large teams?
Well, Pat, first of all thank you for those kind words,
it was very nice.
But what I would say is it really is about a journey.
We've been on a journey for the last five years,
we're looking at our next journey for the next five years.
It is about consistency in what we say to our customers
and what we commit and what we deliver.
And then it's about having a great team, right?
A team that really is extraordinarily ambitious
in what you're trying to accomplish,
but we're able to operationalize it.
And that's sort of how I view it, right.
As we build these relationships
with some of the largest IT providers in the world,
it is about bringing consistency
and bringing our best game every single day.
I've been following AMD for 30 years.
I've interacted a lot with, I think, four CEOs
at AMD and Lisa, What I'm really struck by
has been the consistency of your strategy.
If I go back many years ago
to your financial analyst day,
and I look at what your objectives were
and what you wanted to do
and your strategy of how you wanted to do it,
it's remarkably consistent.
And sure you made a few tactical pivots along the way,
which is just smart business,
but there's a lot of value to that,
of getting your team aligned,
your partners trust you more
because you do exactly what you say you're gonna do.
And I think finally, what I really appreciated,
because in my heart I'm a product person too,
is let's deliver great products.
Pat, that's absolutely right.
We wake up every day thinking about that, Pat.
And like I said, we're very lucky that we're in this market
that is just tremendously exciting
and sort of the core of what we need to do
with digital transformation.
It's funny, whenever I hear people say
software is eating the world,
I don't correct them,
but I say, well, actually hardware is eating the world too.
You still need hardware.
All right, as important
Exactly.
as software is you still use hardware.
Exactly. So with that, Lisa, we're coming up on time,
but I just want to thank you so much
for making The Six Five Summit even better.
And next year we'd love to have you on,
but for now, this is Pat Moorhead,
for Moor Insights & Strategy,
signing off with Lisa Su, President and CEO of AMD.
Thank you so much, Pat.
Great to be here.
(soft music with zapping sound)
