I think AMD is at our best when we're working with a customer and allowing them to do something they couldn't do before.
— Lisa Su
I went to school at MIT with a whole bunch of engineers. And then I started work one day and asked myself, 'Why do all of these MIT Ph.D.s work for Harvard M.B.A.s?' Why should it be like that? I was one of those engineers who thought, 'Why are these people making those dumb decisions?' So it's fun to be the person making them.
AMD loves gamers.
Great graphics requires more than just high-performance hardware. Gamers know software is just as important.
Gaming is one of those things that's pretty amazing because when you think about it, everybody wants to game; whether you're a casual gamer, or you're an enthusiast gamer, there's a large market for us.
My parents were typical Asian parents, and they do, like all parents, want their children to be successful. They really encouraged my brother and I to study math and science, and that's what we did as kids.
I have extremely high standards.
It's a day-one expectation that when you buy a processor, it's not going to leak your data.
I just had a great curiosity about how things worked.
Being CEO of AMD is a tremendous opportunity to influence the industry and influence the future of computing.
Run toward the hardest problems. This approach has helped me to learn a tremendous amount from both success and failure.
My philosophy is, I can't make every product that can possibly use a high-performance CPU and graphics. Why shouldn't I enable others, in a positive fashion, to leverage AMD IP in more places?
The notion of what we're trying to do at AMD is about bringing out great technology, great products.
Market share is key.
There are positives and negatives to publicly traded and private companies.
AMD's history is we've always had great technology. We've had periods of time where we've done really, really well, and we've had periods of time where we've done not so well. But most of the time we've done well, it's because we've had a leadership product or some technology where we were out in front before anybody else.
What's important for all of us as chip companies is to keep the innovation going: putting out new products, figuring out how we connect these complex systems.
Diversifying the business is definitely a good thing.
Do we care about gaming? We absolutely care.
Gamers love technology, and they have high expectations.
As one of the most important global events for our industry, I look forward to Computex each year.
My dad was going to graduate school at Columbia, in New York, so we moved there. After he graduated, we ended up settling in New York, so I grew up there.
If I sound like a technology geek, that's probably because I am. But I also love running good businesses.
Don't worry about the financials. Just focus on delivering great products.
That's the fun part of being CEO. You can actually say, 'Hey, this is what we should be spending our time on,' and people get it.
Electrical engineering, particularly at MIT, was the hardest major, so I said, 'You know, how about we try that and see how it goes.'
One of the key things is, when you look at semiconductor companies, it's all about experience.
I am grateful for the continued opportunity to take risks and learn from my mistakes as we at AMD strive to use technology to help solve some of the world's toughest challenges.
Everyone in the semiconductor industry, everyone in the technology industry, would benefit from more diversity in the business.
Make sure there are lots of Harvard M.B.A.s working for MIT Ph.D.s in the future.
I think it's fair to say that the age of traditional computing is dead.
I'll say it this way: AMD is a company that generates very strong opinions. There are some people who really like us and are really rooting for us. And then there are some people who say we'll never be able to compete against some of our bigger competitors.
There is a mentality that if you're a long time AMDer, that we're x86: we know what we're doing, and it's just about building better x86 devices.
The key for us is always a multiple-year strategy, and a multiple-year strategy means great products, great customer relationships, and doing solid engineering.
It is incredibly fun to run a company like AMD.
Gamers are some of the toughest people to please. They have extreme requirements. They want everything.
Gaming brings people together.
I love high-performance technologies, the stuff that's the brains of today's products, and AMD was one of the few companies that had this type of technology. I always believed that it was a company that had great technical capability but needed better business focus.
What you have to have is very smart, motivated, dedicated, and focused engineers and focus them on the right goal.
I really like to win.
There's no question that technology is extraordinarily competitive.
People are really capable if you're able to give them the confidence to get something done and paint the picture of where we need to go.
My view of AMD is that we have a tremendous set of technology assets, people, capability, customer relationships. We're not going to define ourselves in somebody else's shadow.
I've spent my entire career in semiconductors.
I do think the blockchain infrastructure is here to stay.
When I step back and look at what's important to AMD, it's about graphics leadership - visual computing leadership - as well as a strong computing experience. We have the capability to integrate those two together.
The world is starving for new ideas and great leaders who will champion those ideas.
What we're really trying to do is have heterogeneous systems really become the foundation of our computing going forward. And that's the idea that you make every processor and every accelerator a peer processor.
I like the PC market. It's a big market, but it's a very volatile market as well.
I'm a big believer in using the best IP for a given application.
