Recently, Lisa Su, CEO at AMD, was at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, for a fireside chat. She reminisced about her days in academia, discussed her reasons for pursuing PhD, and had a few words for aspiring engineers and researchers working in computer science and electronics.
Su was also optimistic about the semiconductor industry’s research and development in India. The event concluded with Su being felicitated in traditional South Indian fashion, with a bright, pink-coloured shawl.
However, she did have her say in a heated debate about scaling up the hardware underneath AI and LLMs. In Su’s own words, she said, “There is some slowdown in Moore’s law, but I don’t believe it is dead.”
This was in response to a question by a researcher at IISc regarding the future of a post-CMOS world.
While she said that Moore’s law is definitely changing, she was quite optimistic regarding the future of CMOS. Moreover, she asserted that despite the advent of newer potential materials and techniques, such as in-memory quantum computing, she remained bullish on CMOS.
Su acknowledged that CMOS will continue to improve because of the intense focus and investment in the industry. Su said, “CMOS keeps getting better because we have the entire engineering infrastructure trying to push what is beyond 2nm technology. So I think it is still a race.”
“I think there will be a place for them (new materials, and technologies), but it is a relatively slow process”, said Su.
Interestingly, Intel and AMD have partnered to form the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group, which will focus on expanding the x86 ecosystem. “Establishing the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group will ensure that the x86 architecture continues evolving as the compute platform of choice for developers and customers,” said Su, at AMD’s Advancing AI 2024 event.
According to Moore’s law, the number of transistors on a device doubles roughly every two years, increasing performance. This idea has driven the semiconductor sector for years.
2024 may just be the year that Moore’s Law is being put to rest. Earlier this year, NVIDIA unveiled its Blackwell GPU, featuring 208 billion transistors and processing trillion-parameter AI models 30 times faster than previous technologies. With this announcement, NVIDIA likely surpassed Moore’s Law, by achieving exponential increases in computational speed within a shorter expected timeframe.
However, in the Q2 FY 24 earnings call, Su was confident about competing with Blackwell and expects AMD to close the performance gap faster than anticipated with their new MI350 hardware series.
Moreover, at the fireside chat, Su also referred to NVIDIA’s CUDA as a ‘legacy technology’ while acknowledging that it is still the gold-standard software ecosystem for GPUs.
“Our strategy is that the world actually needs an open-source software environment. It needs an environment that is actually hardware agnostic,” said Su. This indicates AMD’s software advancements with the ROCm stack, aiming to offer an “open alternative” to NVIDIA’s closed software ecosystem, appealing to customers wanting flexibility and cost-effective AI compute options.
Supreeth Koundinya, Technology Journalist @ AIM Media House, with Lisa Su, behind the stage at IISc.
In a world that widely celebrates Jobs and Gates, Su is inspiring in more ways than one might be aware of. When Su took over as CEO in 2014, AMD was on the verge of bankruptcy. Its stock price hovered around $3 a share. In the next ten years, Lisa managed to turn AMD’s fortunes from a market value of $2 billion at the end of 2014 to $315 billion as of November 2024.
At the fireside chat, she also credited AMD’s CTO, Mark Papermaster, with the company’s success.
“Building the most, the largest and the most impactful semiconductors that we could build was my reason for joining AMD. First of all, Mark Papermaster, as the CTO, he and I were absolute partners in this,” said Su.
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