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The Exiled · 28.11.2024., 11:26

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Ten years under Dr Su: How AMD went from budget Intel alternative to x86 contender

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In early 2014, with Rory Read at the helm, it had been a while since AMD had tasted glory. By Read's departure, the last time the company posed a real threat to Intel was back in the early 2000s with its Athlon 64 processors. After that point, the company slowly slid into position as the budget alternative for users who either couldn't justify or afford Intel's pricing.

By 2014, AMD's primary core architecture for desktop chips was codenamed Piledriver, a Bulldozer successor, but the only thing they are really remembered for is being power hungry and underperforming – on The Reg we once joked they could double up as portable space heaters. As for Intel's Sandy and Ivy Bridge chips, they were a design triumph that led to Chipzilla winning then maintaining dominance over the whole x86 market without breaking a sweat. And it wasn't seeing much pushback from AMD, whose lackluster architecture allowed Intel to dictate the direction of the desktop market. On top of this, AMD's revenues left a lot to be desired, its market share was even thinner, and it meant a long climb ahead if it wanted back in the game.

No one would have known this more than MIT engineer Dr Lisa Su, who was already AMD's chief operating officer running the company's sales and marketing teams. Named an IEEE Fellow in 2009, Su had been poached by AMD from Freescale Semiconductor, where she was CTO, in 2012. Su's appointment in 2014 tasked her with transforming not only AMD's overall narrative and public perception going forward, but also with defining a roadmap that was technically up to par. AMD needed to rebuild its core architectures from the ground up to have any hope of clawing back market share. Under her leadership, AMD shifted from the "affordable" alternative to a genuine contender. Ryzen put AMD back in the desktop market, EPYC began chipping away at Intel's datacenter dominance, and RDNA gave AMD's GPUs a second life. Today, AMD is no longer just the budget pick; it's setting the pace on price and performance, forcing Intel to keep up.

AMD spent the early 2010s struggling to stay relevant. Bulldozer, the CPU architecture it had pinned its hopes on, was supposed to keep AMD in the race with Intel. Instead, it became a case study on missed opportunities. Why? Bulldozer focused on core count at the expense of per-core performance, which backfired because most software still relied on single-threaded performance, Intel's area of strength. AMD's chips ran hot and simply couldn't compete on speed, leaving Intel to dominate the desktop CPU market on performance. Su didn't waste time when she took over as CEO in 2014. She binned the failing strategies and got AMD to work on a new roadmap that focused on solid engineering.

The result of all this was Zen, which we know today as AMD's Ryzen series. The original Zen microarchitecture launched in 2017, and it was a ground-up redesign focused on performance, efficiency, and scalability. It thrusted AMD back into the desktop game, but also became the foundation of AMD's key processors across all its primary product segments. Perhaps the biggest obstacle of the past ten years has been the graphics market, and despite significant improvements with both RDNA and RDNA 2, AMD still trails nVidia in performance. In areas such as ray tracing, AI-based upscaling, and general developer support, AMD still struggles to compete. nVidia's CUDA ecosystem has kept team green the dominant force in GPUs, especially in AI and gaming, which has kept AMD playing second fiddle despite competitive pricing and performance.

The biggest win for AMD of late is its market share in the server space, where formerly it had no presence whatsoever. Now it stands around 24 percent, a major improvement, and, with EPYC's dominance in core count compared to Intel, is sure to help push this even higher in the years to come. Su noted in the company's most recent earnings call for Q3 2024: "EPYC has become the CPU of choice for the modern datacenter and our multi-generation product portfolio delivers leadership performance and significant [total cost of ownership] advantages across virtually every enterprise and cloud workload."

Izvor: The Register