Question who is most responsible for saving AMD

positivedoppler

Golden Member
Apr 30, 2012
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It was only 5 years ago AMD ended the year 2.3 billion in debt, 780 million in cash, and under 4 billion in sale.
https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/AMD/financials/annual/balance-sheet
I still recall the excessive doom and gloom posts from a few members here who can no longer be found.

The AMD BR wagon was only 5 years ago, and now they are back and once again a serious threat to Intel and Nvidia, who do you think was the most responsible for saving the ship? Lisa Su, Rory Read, Jim Keller, Papermaster, etc..?
 
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scannall

Golden Member
Jan 1, 2012
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I would say Lisa Su or Mark Papermaster. Jim Keller was great, but I think he really wanted K12 more than Zen.
I would add Dirk Meyer and Rory Read to that list. Dirk getting the financials in order, and Rory for getting the semi-custom part going. Just to have a company still around for Lisa Su, Mark Papermaster, Mike Clark and many others to work their magic.
 

13Gigatons

Diamond Member
Apr 19, 2005
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Jim Keller was great, but I think he really wanted K12 more than Zen.
Not really:
 
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Topweasel

Diamond Member
Oct 19, 2000
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Not really:

Absolutely everything I have read had Jim brought in to work with the K12 team and that it was Mark and Lisa that decided to move K12 teams to work on Zen and shelving K12 was the reason he didn't renew his contract, and didn't stay long enough to see if Zen would actually fix AMD.

Keller is a hot commodity and the cult of Keller helps him get jobs paying him probably what he should be getting paid. Him telling the world that K12 was his baby and sidelining it for Zen made him not want to be there any more would be foolish considering the success of Zen.
 

AnandThenMan

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Nov 11, 2004
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TSMC. Not having to do production on your own product was probably the best decision they made. No clue who made it, but I'd suspect it goes years back.
Hector Ruiz, he is the one that decided AMD should go fabless because the ongoing resources required to keep running their own fab would end up sinking the company. That saved AMD. As bad as Ruiz was that decision was a moment of brilliance.
 
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LikeLinus

Lifer
Jul 25, 2001
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Hector Ruiz, he is the one that decided AMD should go fabless because the ongoing resources required to keep running their own fab would end up sinking the company. That saved AMD. As bad as Ruiz was that decision was a moment of brilliance.

Amazing and he really should get more credit for their current position. It's always the new person who gets the recognition, but with CPUs being a 4-5 year cycle, he really positioned the production to far exceed what they could do. Again, smart move on their part.
 

positivedoppler

Golden Member
Apr 30, 2012
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Absolutely everything I have read had Jim brought in to work with the K12 team and that it was Mark and Lisa that decided to move K12 teams to work on Zen and shelving K12 was the reason he didn't renew his contract, and didn't stay long enough to see if Zen would actually fix AMD.

Keller is a hot commodity and the cult of Keller helps him get jobs paying him probably what he should be getting paid. Him telling the world that K12 was his baby and sidelining it for Zen made him not want to be there any more would be foolish considering the success of Zen.

Was Keller the primary design lead for zen?
 

JasonLD

Senior member
Aug 22, 2017
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I think it is their engineering team that created Zen architectures with chiplet strategy that enabled them to put them in a position where they are today. Despite the process lead that TSMC enjoys right now, had AMD gone monolithic with their Zen architecture, I don't think AMD would have had power/performance advantages they have today over Intel.
 

thesmokingman

Platinum Member
May 6, 2010
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It was only 5 years ago AMD ended the year 2.3 billion in debt, 780 million in cash, and under 4 billion in sale.
https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/AMD/financials/annual/balance-sheet
I still recall the excessive doom and gloom posts from a few members here who can no longer be found.

The AMD BR wagon was only 5 years ago, and now they are back and once again a serious threat to Intel and Nvidia, who do you think was the most responsible for saving the ship? Lisa Su, Rory Read, Jim Keller, Papermaster, etc..?

Behind Su, the Austin team... oh and Senior Fellow Michael Clark deserves some serious distinction here. You know since Clark is the chief architect of Zen.

 

Markfw

Moderator Emeritus, Elite Member
May 16, 2002
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I would say Intel and 10nm node.
Because if all was well with Intel, AMD would still not be competitive.
Just look at Nvidia and AMD.
AMD has concentrated their efforts on CPUs, NOT GPUs, so that argument is false. If Intel were on track from 4 years ago, it would be a competitive battle, now its just a slaughter.

Why do you have to try and troll every AMD thread ?
 

thesmokingman

Platinum Member
May 6, 2010
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I think it is their engineering team that created Zen architectures with chiplet strategy that enabled them to put them in a position where they are today. Despite the process lead that TSMC enjoys right now, had AMD gone monolithic with their Zen architecture, I don't think AMD would have had power/performance advantages they have today over Intel.

Why the F would they do monolithic? The whole point of chiplets was because they could not go monolithic like Intel. Zen's whole design in essence was dictated by the limitations AMD had because they were fabless and no one has the monolithic experience that Intel has.
 

JasonLD

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Aug 22, 2017
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Why the F would they do monolithic? The whole point of chiplets was because they could not go monolithic like Intel. Zen's whole design in essence was dictated by the limitations AMD had because they were fabless and no one has the monolithic experience that Intel has.

um.....ok? Just trying to figure out what prompted such an aggressive response lol.

I basically said they made a great engineering decision to go chiplets instead of monolithic solution.
 

AnandThenMan

Diamond Member
Nov 11, 2004
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I would say Intel and 10nm node.
Because if all was well with Intel, AMD would still not be competitive.
Just look at Nvidia and AMD.
Bulldozer is responsible for Intel's success. Intel didn't build that AMD did :rolleyes:
Why the F would they do monolithic? The whole point of chiplets was because they could not go monolithic like Intel. Zen's whole design in essence was dictated by the limitations AMD had because they were fabless and no one has the monolithic experience that Intel has.
Intel can't go monolithic to compete with AMD and will copy AMD's chiplet strategy. That says the fab process in general is the limitation not what AMD has access to. This is what Intel does, copy. Intel dumped on the following innovations but ultimately went on to use them.

multi-core
AMD64 (how is Itanic doing these days)
IMC
chiplet (future)
fabless (possibly)
 
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