The heavy investments into HMB between SK Hynix & AMD might also not have happened. They went down this road before HMB demand popped off and it was a risky bet.
Sharon was the AI Chief of Staff brought in through an acquihire, managed all the high-visibility external/internal AI engagements, reported directly into Lisa Su, and was being groomed to be Lisa's successor. Even with all that, she couldn't make it 2 years at AMD.
Our internally developed execs/directors/VPs have no credibility with the frontier labs or hyperscalers because they're non-technical types. They don't understand software management so they couldn't fix any of the problems with ROCm by making systemic changes in how we develop software e.g. Alan Lee who got pushed out ages ago after spending years promising ROCm would get better while nothing happened.
The only software-oriented technical VP with credibility now is Anush Elangovan. He was also brought in through an acquihire, forced us to upstream, forced us to have CI, and adopt basic software practices common at every other company. If we lose him, we're going to start plummeting fast.
I remember buying an AMD K6-2 back in the day as it was cheaper and better. I've dropped in and out of the AMD sphere depending on who was winning at the given moment.
Now they're both losing.
why not start with trying to fix that?
unfortunately most us industry fell victim to this mba-ization of companies.
And the software ecosystem was already in place (even though everything had to be rewritten).
Had Apple gone with Be instead, most likely all three companies would have gone bankrupt before 2000, and Pixar would be Jobs last successful company instead.
Where NeXT went wrong is in being astronomically expensive, which drove its addressable market to nothing. This is the exact same mistake Jobs made with the Lisa. The significantly inferior Apple II platform was far more successful.
The way I look at it, AMD and others dumped $25m into a very early AI play that never was going to be successful. I don't fault them for trying.
There was no way she could even come close to successor of Lisa though. The grooming thing was a media play at best. Dr. Fei-Fei Li would be a heck of a lot more appropriate than Sharon.
Anush is excellent and turned around the software story. If he goes, the party is over.
It's not necessary for every company to attempt 'revenue maxxing' by jumping into every field.
AMD made $3.5 billion in profit last year after all expenses were paid. It might be galling to this generation of avarists, but maybe that's enough?
You mean going mild.
The $17bn that AMD is projecting to make mid-2026 is what NVIDIA was already making mid-2023.
Both companies were somewhat similar in revenue towards the end of 2022 (just before/around the ChatGPT launch).
That's what the GP meant by "sitting out a generational AI boom".
I think Intel figured out way to be even worse…
The board should've sacked the entire leadership team of Intel and AMD years and years ago.
The fact that you can sit through both a mining boom and now a generational AI boom and have little to show for it and still keep your job is a Yahoo!-level fumble.