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points by mickeyp 3 days ago | 0 comments

I'm not surprised.

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.

[–] AMDAnon 3 days ago

They can't find new leaders! Sharon Zhou, VP who handles all our engagements with the frontier labs quit today to be an MTS at Anthropic. https://lnkd.in/p/g53S3-fG

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.

I don't see any way out of this hole. We can't fire our execs and promote internally because our internal directors/VPs are mostly non-technical. We've been trying to pull leadership in with acquihires but we've been losing them too. Best win was replacing Alan Lee w/ Anush Elangovan which finally got ROCm working but there's a massive re-org coming he might not survive.

[–] latchkey 3 days ago

Sharon was acqui-hired after Lamini failed to find product market fit, and she had to fire her co-founder Greg. Greg went to Tensorwave (another AMD play) and eventually quit there as well.

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.

[–] mickeyp 3 days ago

How sad.

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.

[–] NooneAtAll5 3 days ago

> our internal directors/VPs are mostly non-technical

why not start with trying to fix that?

[–] z3ratul163071 2 days ago

well, that explains everything.

unfortunately most us industry fell victim to this mba-ization of companies.

[–] georgeburdell 3 days ago

100% Lisa Su is a control freak and thought Zhou was a threat. Cult of personality CEOs do not generally end well for the company

[–] josh_frome 3 days ago

Jobs being the exception that proves the rule

[–] justsomehnguy 3 days ago

Jobs failed hard and was outed in the first place. And he didn't 'come back' he was quite literally bought in with NeXTSTEP. Don't forget $150M from Microsoft and the Office for Mac deal.

[–] LeFantome 2 days ago

NeXT software on lower end Apple hardware was a winning combination.

And the software ecosystem was already in place (even though everything had to be rewritten).

[–] cowlevel 3 days ago

He backed it up with actual product-building merit and enough (but not a lot of) reality-testing. His products were successful largely because of him. Too many copycats forget about the merit part of the equation.

[–] pjmlp 3 days ago

Not all products, NeXT was a major failure, with a few books telling the story how it all went down, only due to Apple's acquisition there was a moment that with Apple's remaining cash, and what was left of OpenSTEP, they managed to survive both companies.

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.

[–] LeFantome 2 days ago

I am no Steve Jobs fan but NeXT was amazing and much of the tech is still commercially important today. There is no way you can call it a technical failure.

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.

[–] amarcheschi 3 days ago

I can apply as a ceo if you accept master students. Having studied drama, I can definitely say I act better than pat gelsinger

[–] specialist 3 days ago

Sure, but do you have any missionary / evangelism experience?

[–] amarcheschi 3 days ago

Unfortunately no, but I can pray really hard maybe

[–] skew-aberration 3 days ago

You might be better qualified as a shareholder then

[–] z3ratul163071 2 days ago

"Even with all that, she couldn't make it 2 years at AMD." imagine how toxic and rotten the company must be from the inside

[–] chorsestudios 3 days ago

Ryzen series chips might not have been released if AMD's entire leadership team was sacked many years ago.

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.

[–] throwaway85825 3 days ago

Rory Read doesn't get enough credit for saving AMD from bankrupty.

[–] kcb 3 days ago

What are we talking about in this thread. This post is literally about AMD revenue going wild during the AI boom.

[–] halJordan 3 days ago

Ok, I'm glad I'm not the crazy one. I wondered for a second lol

[–] ckastner 3 days ago

> This post is literally about AMD revenue going wild during the AI boom.

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), so it's not as if NVIDIA was already that far ahead in financial terms. But right around ChatGPT, NVIDIA went all-in on AI, for example by securing massive leading-edge capacity at TSMC, even outbidding Apple.

That's what the GP meant by "sitting out a generational AI boom".

[–] expedition32 2 days ago

And when the boom goes bust guess who will still be around chugging along?

[–] sofixa 3 days ago

Intel have gone through 3 leadership teams in 10ish years

[–] georgeburdell 3 days ago

They brought back some questionable former managers like the guy responsible for 14nm, Sanjay Natarajan, which was the first process to get stuck with a protracted period of low yields.

[–] mickeyp 3 days ago

Gosh, you're right. I thought it was just one.

[–] dingaling 3 days ago

"The fact that you can sit through both a mining boom and now a generational AI boom..."

It's not necessary for every company to 'revenue maxx' by jumping on every trend.

AMD made $3.5 billion in profit last year, money left over after all salaries were paid and all expenses were settled. It might be galling to this generation of avarists, but maybe that's enough?

'Doing a decent job' seems to have become seen as archaic these days, which explains much of how the stock market works. The line doesn't _have_ to keep going up faster and faster.

[–] kevin_thibedeau 3 days ago

AMD is also a hardware company with significantly more overhead than a software house that is swimming in margin.

[–] BobbyTables2 3 days ago

Even Yahoo has an AI and better search results than they did in the past…

I think Intel figured out way to be even worse…