The semiconductor industry is bracing to potentially lose more than $1 billion once Donald Trump announces chip tariffs.
Two sources familiar with discussions between chipmakers and lawmakers last week told Reuters that Applied Materials, Lam Research, and KLAβthree of the largest US chip equipment makersβcould each lose about "$350 million over a year related to the tariffs." That adds up to likely more than $1 billion in losses between the three, and smaller firms will likely face similarly spiked costs, estimating losses in the tens of millions.
Some chipmakers are already feeling the pain of Trump's trade war, despite a 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs and a tenuous exception for semiconductors and other electronics.
AMD says that the U.S. governmentβs license control requirement for exporting AI chips to China and certain other countries may have a material impact on its earnings. If AMD doesnβt successfully obtain a license, the company could be on the hook for roughly $800 million in inventory, purchase commitments, and related reserves charges, it said [β¦]
Framework, the designers and sellers of the modular and repairable Framework Laptop 13 and other products, announced today that it would be "temporarily pausing US sales" on some of its laptop configurations as a result of new tariffs put on Taiwanese imports by the Trump administration. The affected models will be removed from Framework's online store for now, and there's no word on when buyers can expect them to come back.
"We priced our laptops when tariffs on imports from Taiwan were 0 percent," the company responded to a post asking why it was pausing sales. "At a 10 percent tariff, we would have to sell the lowest-end SKUs at a loss."
"Other consumer goods makers have performed the same calculations and taken the same actions, though most have not been open about it," Framework said. Nintendo also paused US preorders for its upcoming Switch 2 console last week after the tariffs were announced.
March brought us new Macs, ultra-thin foldables, and even an exoskeleton. However, some of our most-anticipated tech for the month won't arrive until April.
James Doohan as Lt. Commander Montgomery Scotty Scott on Star Trek
CBS via Getty Images
If AI agents catch on, there may not be enough computing capacity.
AI agents generate many more tokens than chatbots, increasing computational demands.
More AI chips may be needed if AI agents grow, Barclays analysts warned.
In Star Trek, the Starship Enterprise had a chief engineer, Montgomery "Scotty" Scott, who regularly had to explain to Captain Kirk that certain things were impossible to pull off, due to practicalities such as the laws of physics.
"The engines cannae take it, Captain!" is a famous quote that the actor may actually not have said on the TV show. But you get the idea.
We may be approaching such a moment in the tech industry right now, as the AI agent trend gathers momentum.
The field is beginning to shift from relatively simple chatbots to more capable AI agents that can autonomously complete complex tasks. Is there enough computing power to sustain this transformation?
According to a recent Barclays report, the AI industry will have enough capacity to support 1.5 billion to 22 billion AI agents.
This could be enough to revolutionize white-collar work, but additional computing power may be needed to run these agents while also satisfying consumer demand for chatbots, the Barclays analysts explained in a note to investors this week.
It's all about tokens
AI agents generate far more tokens per user query than traditional chatbots, making them more computationally expensive.
Tokens are the language of generative AI and are at the core of emerging pricing models in the industry. AI models break down words and other inputs into numerical tokens to make them easier to process and understand. One token is about ΒΎ of a word.
More powerful AI agents may rely on "reasoning" models, such as OpenAI's o1 and o3 and DeepSeek's R1, which break queries and tasks into more manageable chunks. Each step in these chains of thought creates more tokens, which must be processed by AI servers and chips.
"Agent products run on reasoning models for the most part, and generate about 25x more tokens per query compared to chatbot products," the Barclays analysts wrote.
"Super Agents"
OpenAI offers a ChatGPT Pro service that costs $200 monthly and taps into its latest reasoning models. The Barclays analysts estimated that if this service used the startup's o1 model, it would generate about 9.4 million tokens per year per subscriber.
There's been media reports recently that OpenAI could offer even more powerful AI agent services that cost $2,000 a month or even $20,000 a month.
The Barclays analysts referred to these as "super agents," and estimated that these services could generate 36 million to 356 million tokens per year, per user.
More chips, Captain!
That's a mind-blowing amount of tokens that would consume a mountain of computing power.
The AI industry is expected to have 16 million accelerators, a type of AI chip, online this year. Roughly 20% of that infrastructure may be dedicated to AI inference β essentially the computing power needed to run AI applications in real time.
If agentic products take off and are very useful to consumers and enterprise users, we will likely need "many more inference chips," the Barclays analysts warned.
The tech industry may even need to repurpose some chips that were previously used to train AI models and use those for inference, too, the analysts added.
They also predicted that cheaper, smaller, and more efficient models, like those developed by DeepSeek, will have to be used for AI agents, rather than pricier proprietary models.
When a top analyst skewered AMD's software, CEO Lisa Su called him personally to chat.
AMD's AI chips have struggled to compete against Nvidia's dominance, and software is its weakness.
Those who know Su told Business Insider she will never settle for second place.
What should a CEO do when their company is publicly called out for an inferior product? Many would stay silent. Not AMD CEO Lisa Su.
In early February, AMD released new data showing how well its AI chips performed at training large language models, using benchmarks developed by a company called SemiAnalysis. Just weeks earlier, the same group had published a searing review of AMD's tentpole graphics processing unit.
The analysts wrote that while the chip looks good on paper, reaching its potential in reality was almost impossible with AMD's existing software. Chief analyst Dylan Patel and the SemiAnalysis team spent five months assessing AMD's GPU, which has struggled to gain market share and mindshare against the dominant player, Nvidia.
"We were hopeful that AMD could emerge as a strong competitor to Nvidia in training workloads, but, as of today, this is unfortunately not the case," SemiAnalysis published in December.
The next day, Patel got a call from Su. The call was scheduled for 30 minutes, but it lasted 90.
"Feedback is a gift even when it's critical," Su tweeted after the call. The new performance data released in February were a punch back in a fight that's far from over.
2024 was the year of Lisa Su. She was Time and Chief Executive Magazine's CEO of the year.
Last year, AMD outsold Intel in its data center business, overtaking its old rival in the traditional data center world. This became the triumphant apex of Su's first decade as CEO of AMD. Revenue for the whole of 2024 was up 14% year over year β gross profits up 22% β and yet when Su reported the results in February, the stock went down.
As Su achieved what many thought impossible and conquered her old foil, Intel, a new one had already presented itself in AI prognosticator Nvidia, led by CEO Jensen Huang, Su's cousin born in the same region of Taiwan as her. Shareholders wouldn't let her forget her biggest rival.
Whether AMD can meet the seemingly insurmountable challenge of Nvidia's estimated 90% market share may come down to the approaches of two Taiwanese-born, US-educated, distantly-related CEOs.
Su has already stated the company's goals. She's leaning into open-source software and beefing up support for large language model training and inference customers. Most importantly, she's raising the bar for AMD's software so that it can better stand up to Nvidia's β since Huang has long professed that software is Nvidia's secret sauce.
"We are still in the very early stages with AI, and we believe there's no one-size-fits-all approach to AI compute," an AMD spokesperson told Business Insider. AMD declined to make Su available for an interview.
BI spoke with nine people for this story β five of whom have at one point had a personal relationship with Su and three of whom worked under her at AMD. They said that whether in 2007, 2017, or 2027, the stoic, thoughtful, quietly confident executive walking the brightest stages in the tech world is exactly who she seems. Though she may never conquer Nvidia, she won't rest while she's in the number two spot. Her play involves intently listening to partners as well as critics, and it's worked before.
AMD CEO Lisa Su's public presentation style has changed since she took over the company in 2014.
AMD
Lisa Su says, 'Why not?'
Some early indications suggested that starting at the bottom motivated Su to get to the top.
Born in Taiwan and raised in New York, Su intentionally picked the most challenging STEM field she could think of: electrical engineering. After earning her doctorate, she received multiple offers to stay in academia but decided to join Texas Instruments instead, Dimitri Antoniadis, her MIT thesis advisor, told BI. She wanted to manage people and projects, she recently told Stanford business students. After leaving TI for IBM, she was tapped to serve as a technical assistant for Lou Gerstner, IBM's chairman and CEO.
Antoniadis recalled late-night phone conversations with Su when she was at these "juncture points" in her career. She left IBM in 2007, spent four and a half years at Freescale Semiconductor, and then came to AMD in 2012.
The professor got one such call in late 2014. Su had managed AMD's various business units and operations for nearly three years β deep in the weeds of the entire company yet without the authority to set the overall direction. She called Antoniadis when she was asked to take the CEO job, which meant going after a market dominated by Intel. The original Silicon Valley icon had a market capitalization of over $150 billion and a reputation for ruthlessness. AMD's market cap was just $2 billion.
"At the time, I said, 'Lisa, are you serious? Taking on Intel?' She said, 'Why not?'" Antoniadis told BI.
Su sought multiple opinions on the big decision to head AMD. Lip-Bu Tan, a legendary semiconductor CEO turned investor who will step into the Intel CEO role on March 18, was also on the call list. Tan and Su met years earlier when she was at Freescale Semiconductor, and he was impressed from the start, he told BI.
Tan was fully aware of AMD's sad state at the time. The firm had completed two rounds of layoffs since 2011 and pulled out of the processor market. The company needed focus.
"Only the gaming business was doing well. The rest were struggling," Tan said. Despite this, he didn't hesitate to recommend the job to Su. He had just orchestrated a revival of a similar magnitude at Cadence Design Systems and knew the opportunity such a turnaround could be.
"The market value was less than $3 billion β you can't go wrong with that. It is so undervalued," Tan said of AMD.
Su took over AMD on October 8, 2014. A 7% staff cut proceeded, and Su set out to make long-term bets and win back customers. Tan said Su soon had top tech execs like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Dell COO Jeff Clarke trusting her, mainly due to her hands-on style. Even for routine annual business reviews, Su knows all the numbers and listens intently to concerns, sources said.
"They love her. She is very engaged β very involved," Tan said.
Su has evolved her style over her 10 years as CEO of AMD. She's somewhat less stoic, makes jokes onstage, wears brighter colors, has more perfectly coiffed hair, and has come to appreciate Christian Louboutin heels. AMD declined to comment on these details.
"I am not surprised at all where she is right now. I truly expected it," Antoniadis told BI.
AMD's market cap has grown to about $160 billion as of Wednesday β much higher than its $2 billion market cap when Su first started. This month, all AI stocks have taken a dive amid uncertainty surrounding the Trump administration's policy shifts.
Now, Su has a new miracle to perform.
Lisa Su, CEO of AMD.
AMD
Su v. Huang
In 2018, Su sat with a handful of Wall Street analysts in a private meeting space near the Las Vegas Convention Center. The Consumer Electronics Show, one of the largest tech conferences of the year, bustled in the massive building's halls.
Su was just over three years into her job as CEO of AMD, and the company's stock hovered above just $10 per share.
The analysts in that Las Vegas conference room had a lot of advice for the then 48-year-old CEO, according to a person present, who asked not to be named since the session was private. The room was full of men eager to tell Su how to seize on her progress and take AMD to the next level. There was chatter in the nerdier accelerated computing circles that machine learning was ready to scale, and the analysts weren't sure AMD was seeing the signs.
Su took it all in and politely thanked everyone. She knew accelerated computing would change the world as early as 2017, she has since said in interviews. The graphics processing unit made that possible.
At the time, the entertainment industry used them for gaming and graphics rendering. While AMD has designed this kind of hardware for two decades, Nvidia's Huang beat the entire tech industry to the punch when he identified the AI opportunity for GPUs and started building software to help it spread. Since ChatGPT's birth, Nvidia and AMD have been in an epic race β only Nvidia had a massive head start.
Both Huang and Su are notoriously hardworking β late nights and weekends are a given.
But Huang is a showman. He dominates a stage whether it be at the front of a boardroom or a concert arena. Su is less flashy. She rarely, if ever, raises her voice, and her business strategy echoes that quiet, inexhaustible, confident consistency, sources said.
"You know she's in charge, but she's also a very quiet leader," said Jodi Shelton, cofounder and CEO of the Global Semiconductor Alliance. Shelton recalled an intimate dinner at Su's Texas home with just the CEO and her husband, Daniel Lin, where Su asked most of the questions.
"She doesn't need to interject when someone's speaking. She doesn't have to be the loudest person in the room," Shelton continued.
Onstage, Su often paces, making measured announcements. At team meetings, she drills for answers about what needs to be done next and delegates tasks, personally reviewing AMD's GPU distribution on spreadsheets, the AMD employees said.
In a world where CEOs like former Intel leader Pat Gelsinger have announced plans such as five nodes in four years and fell short in execution, AMD has slowly marched forward. Even Nvidia's yearly cadence of new GPU generations has hit production and installation snags. Su is wary of overpromising and underexecuting, several sources said. Execution is non-negotiable.
"That's not very easy for people to do for such a long time," Lamini founder Sharon Zhou, who has committed to AMD hardware over Nvidia, told BI. "Which is why I think she presents the main threat to Nvidia. It forces Nvidia into a place where they can't make mistakes."
Huang is motivated by being so early that he can form new markets around new technologies, Nvidia executive Rev Lebaredian told BI. Su wants to meet existing demand with an unfailingly great product.
"She knows AMD products technically in and out and can hold her own discussing any product with its respective engineers," one AMD employee said. "She's pretty quiet in person, but you could tell by the way she was looking at the lab and talking to the engineers that she was proud and happy to be there."
Her relentless consistency and focus on strong, reciprocal customer relationships make her undiminishable as a competitor, even for Nvidia, sources said.
"She's one of the most responsive people," Zhou said. When Zhou was trying to close Series A funding for Lamini, Su offered up the entire afternoon to chat with potential investors, a day after an earnings call.
AMD CEO Lisa Su's star has risen even as the company struggles to take market share from Nvidia. Here, she is pictured at Computex Taipei, one of the world's largest computer and technology expos, in June 2024.
AP Photo/Chiang Ying-ying
The only way is software
Many chip industry analysts agree that while AMD's hardware has caught up, it can't truly compete without better software. Nvidia's CUDA software has become the industry standard and allows engineers to program GPUs with flexibility and relative ease. AMD's software is still a work in progress, as SemiAnalysis's report detailed.
For the full 2024 fiscal year, Nvidia reported $115.2 billion in revenue in its data center segment β where most AI computing happens. AMD reported $12.6 billion for data centers in the same time period (though the reporting periods are slightly different). It's an enormous gulf that even the best of execution may never close.
Those who know Su say she will never settle for second.
"She does want to win, which doesn't mean second. It actually means first. First, you have to be second, and then you get to be first," Zhou said.
If Su has a winning strategy in mind, it's still a mystery to some AMD watchers.
In a February 5 note to investors, Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya wrote that AMD had not yet "managed to articulate" how or from where it would wrest market share from Nvidia.
"It could take much more in software, scale deployment, and system-level integration to break AMD's current less than 5% market share," Arya wrote.
Winning for Su will be about picking her fights, said Tan, the incoming Intel CEO, who is also friends with Huang. In 2024, Nvidia's R&D budget was about twice AMD's. Su still has to be discerning.
"You have to pick your best field," Tan said. "You can't do everything, like Jensen," he continued. Huang makes the menu, he said. Su can only choose a few dishes to battle over.
On the company's February earnings call, Su moved up the company's next chip launch by a few months.
AMD's fourth-quarter earnings beat expectations, yet investors balked. The Wall Street analyst consensus was that revenue was growing, though not enough came from AI.
"This is a 10-year arc. This is not a 2-year arc. So let's not think about this as what's going to happen next quarter," Su told Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff at its conference in September.
Even three years later, AMD's high-end X3D-series processors still aren't a thing that most people need to spend extra money onβunder all but a handful of circumstances, your GPU will be the limiting factor when you're running games, and few non-game apps benefit from the extra 64MB chunk of L3 cache that is the processors' calling card. They've been a reasonably popular way for people with old AM4 motherboards to extend the life of their gaming PCs, but for AM5 builds, a regular Zen 4 or Zen 5 CPU will not bottleneck modern graphics cards most of the time.
But high-end PC building isn't always about what's rational, and people spending $2,000 or more to stick a GeForce RTX 5090 into their systems probably won't worry that much about spending a couple hundred extra dollars to get the fastest CPU they can get. That's the audience for the new Ryzen 9 9950X3D, a 16-core, Zen 5-based, $699 monster of a processor that AMD begins selling tomorrow.
If you'reΒ only worried about game performance (and if you can find one), the Ryzen 7 9800X3D is the superior choice, for reasons that will become apparent once we start looking at charts. But if you want fast game performanceΒ and you need as many CPU cores as you can get for other streaming or video production or rendering work, the 9950X3D is there for you. (It's a little funny to me that this a chip made almost precisely for the workload of the PC building tech YouTubers who will be reviewing it.)Β It's also a processor that Intel doesn't have any kind of answer to.
ItΓ’ΒΒs no secret that AMD has been dominating in PC gaming CPU performance, but you always had to make a difficult choice between Intel and AMD if you used your gaming PC for professional workloads as well. With AMDΓ’ΒΒs $699 Ryzen 9 9950X3D, you donΓ’ΒΒt need to choose: AMD now has the best CPU for both gaming and creator tasks.
With double the cores of the $479 Ryzen 7 9800X3D, the new 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X3D boosts performance in creator workloads like Photoshop and Premiere Pro, to the point where it comfortably beats its closest competitors in the form of IntelΓ’ΒΒs Core i9-14900K and even the latest Core Ultra 9 285K processor.
While AMDΓ’ΒΒs first Zen 5 CPUs disappointed everyone in gaming, the latest X3D versions have more than made up for that. The 9800X3D became the best gaming CPU last year, and now the 9950X3D greatly improves creator workloads while mostly maintaining that stellar gaming performance.
AMD promised it would be Γ’ΒΒthe worldΓ’ΒΒs best processor for gamers and creators,Γ’ΒΒ and the 9950X3D is truly that. ItΓ’ΒΒs the ultimate blow to IntelΓ’ΒΒs flagship CPU lineup.
AMDΓ’ΒΒs latest productivity improvements with the 9950X3D required a redesign of its latest X3D c …
AMD's Ryzen 7 9800X3D is probably the best CPU you can buy if you're trying to put together a fast gaming PC, thanks to its eight Zen 5 CPU cores and extra helping of 3D V-Cache. You don't really need more CPU cores than this to play games, and most games benefit from the extra cache more than they do from a bit of extra clock speed.
AMD announced today that it's following up the 9800X3D with two higher-end X3D processors next week. The 12-core Ryzen 9 9900X3D and 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X3D are both launching on March 12 for $599 and $699, respectively, the same as the launch pricing for the last-generation 7900X3D and 7950X3D but a couple hundred dollars more expensive than the current street pricing for the Ryzen 9900X and 9950X.
AMD recommends the 9900X3D and 9950X3D to people whose gaming PCs also do other heavy-duty non-gaming work or for streamers whose gaming PCs are simultaneously running other apps. But they might also appeal to people who would normally just buy a 9800X3D because that processor has been difficult to find at its $479 MSRP since launching last fall. If a 9800X3D already costs nearly $600, why not spring for a faster chip if you can get one?
AMD is announcing that its latest gaming-oriented Ryzen 9 9950X3D and 9900X3D processors will be available next week. The new chips improve on the 9800X3D, which is widely considered as the best gaming CPU. The new ones feature 16 Zen 5 cores and second-generation 3D V-Cache technology that could help those looking to do more productivity work, such as photo editing or CAD.
The higher end Ryzen 9 9950X3D costs $699 and features 16 cores and 32 threads. Its base clock speed is 4.3 GHz, with up to 5.7 GHz on boost. The chip also features 144MB cache and a TDP of 170W.Β
In a post on X, AMDβs SVP & GM of Computing & Graphics Jack Huynh claimed that the new chip will be βthe worldβs bestβ for both gaming and content creation. The chip could also be used for workstation-level systems, which adds competitive heat on Intelβs Core Ultra 9 285K. However, AMDβs new entry version 9900X3D offering costs $599 compared to Intelβs at $589.
AMDβs Ryzen 9 9950X3D and 9900X3D will be available to order starting on March 12th. The chips come just a week after the company launched its next generation, highly competitive GPUs: the Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT.
But this morningβs launch, while better than recent Nvidia launches in terms of supply, may not have met that bar β and AMD would not deny reports that even the best-priced models of these GPUs are capped to specific quantities, after which they may be sold at higher than $549 or $599.
When The Verge checked this morning, major US retailers Best Buy and Newegg listed as few as a single model of each GPU at their MSRP, which sold out quickly, of course. Most cards are listed for a $100 premium over that MSRP, if not more.
Micro Center appears to be doing far better, with as many as five 9070s and five 9070 XTs at MSRP and a website that claims theyβre even still available for purchase if you visit one of its 28 US locations in person.
What happens next? Itβs not unusual for each graphics card partner to sell a variety of fancier grades of the same GPU at higher prices with fancier cooling and overclocking β but retailers are now suggesting that even the prices of entry-level cards wonβt hold.
βWe have now learned how the recommended prices, also known as MSRP prices, work for the launch of the AMD Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT [β¦] they will apply to a limited number of cards,β wrote Swedish retailer Inet.se, as documented by VideoCardz.
βMSRP is capped quantity of a few hundred, so prices will jump once those are sold through,β UK retailer Overclockers UK also reportedly wrote.
Even Best Buy seemed to suggest that $549 / $599 prices were only temporary. When we visited this morning, the Best Buy website described them like they were on sale,Β though the company has since removed the βsave $80β and βsave $130β you see below. AMD says the Best Buy listings were an error.
We asked AMD:
Can you confirm or deny that the best prices on the best-priced cards are capped in this way?
Can you confirm or deny that only a fraction of the best-priced models of 9070 and 9070 XT will be sold at their announced MSRP?
Can you confirm or deny that AMD has okayed any board partners or retailers whatsoever to raise their prices beyond MSRP after selling through a certain quantity or certain number of shipments?
AMD would not confirm or deny. It did address the larger question of MSRP availability with this statement from chief gaming solutions architect (and gaming marketing boss) Frank Azor, though:
It is inaccurate that $549 / $599 MSRP is launch-only pricing. We expect cards to be available from multiple vendors at $549 / $599 (excluding region specific tariffs and / or taxes) based on the work we have done with our AIB partners, and more are coming. At the same time, the AIBs have different premium configurations at higher price points and those will also continue.
On X, Azor tweeted that AMD is working to replenish stock βin the coming days and weeks,β adding, βMSRP pricing (excluding region specific tariffs and/or taxes) will continue to be encouraged beyond today so donβt despair.β
Update, 4:30PM ET: Added that AMD says the Best Buy listings were in error.
Nvidia's untrammeled dominance of the consumer graphics card market should also be an opportunity for AMD. Nvidia's GeForce RTX 50-series graphics cards have given buyers very little to get excited about, with an unreachably expensive high-end 5090 refresh and modest-at-best gains from 5080 and 5070-series cards that are also pretty expensive by historical standards, when you can buy them at all. Tech YouTubersβboth the people making the videos and the people leaving comments underneath themβhave been almost uniformly unkind to the 50 series, hinting at consumer frustrations and pent-up demand for competitive products from other companies.
Enter AMD's Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 graphics cards. These are aimed right at the middle of the current GPU market at the intersection of high sales volume and decent profit margins. They promise good 1440p and entry-level 4K gaming performance and improved power efficiency compared to previous-generation cards, with fixes for long-time shortcomings (ray-tracing performance, video encoding, and upscaling quality) that should, in theory, make them more tempting for people looking to ditch Nvidia.
Thatβs what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said of the GeForce RTX 5070 when he announced the card at CES in January. Thanks to AI, this new midrange GPU would be able to match the frame rates of what had been the fastest consumer GPU that had previously existed for around one-third the price.
Let's dispel that notion up front. No, the GeForce RTX 5070 is not as fast as an RTX 4090, not without some very creative comparing of non-comparable numbers. Per usual for the 50-series, Nvidia is leaning on its AI-generated interpolated frames for the bulk of its claimed performance improvements. In terms of actual rendering speed, the 5070 isnβt even as fast as a 4080 or a 4070 Ti. Itβs barely faster than last yearβs 4070 Super, and it has disproportionately higher power usage.
As a junior employee at Texas Instruments and IBM in the mid-1990s, Lisa Su said she was lucky to have bosses who asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up β and she realized she wanted to manage people and projects.
Nearly two decades later, she asked herself that same question about AMD when she landed a leadership role at the chipmaker during a tumultuous time in the company's history.
Deciding what AMD wanted to be long term β "when we grow up" β was key, she said during a talk at Stanford Graduate Business School uploaded online on Thursday.
"Decisions that we make today, you will really see the impact three to five years down the road," she said.
Su said that when she worked as AMD's chief operating officer in 2014, the company evaluated building smartphone chips, which were taking off at the time.
"That is a good business, but that actually is not a good business for us because that's not fundamentally what we are best at," she said in Thursday's talk. The company opted to prioritize building high-performance computers.
Su joined AMD as a senior vice president of global business units in 2012, after about 18 years in the semiconductor industry. She said the company was at a "crossroads" and her mentors advised her not to join AMD because it had "a track record of not perfect execution."
After a six-month stint as COO, she was asked to become the company's CEO in October 2014.
At the time, the company's stock was trading at around $3 a share, and it was rumored to be on the verge of bankruptcy due to intense competition from Intel and Nvidia.
Su is credited for turning the company around. She led AMD to diversify its business beyond personal computers and into gaming consoles and designed new chips. In 2018, AMD replaced GlobalFoundries with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company as its main manufacturing partner.
AMD's stock, which peaked at nearly $200 a year ago, was worth $100 on Monday. The fall in the last year came largely from underwhelming revenue data.
AMD is releasing the first detailed specifications of its next-generation Radeon RX 9070 series GPUs and the RDNA4 graphics architecture today, almost two months after teasing them at CES.
The short version is that these are both upper-midrange graphics cards targeting resolutions of 1440p and 4K and meant to compete mainly with Nvidia's incoming and outgoing 4070- and 5070-series GeForce GPUs, including the RTX 4070, RTX 5070, RTX 4070 Ti and Ti Super, and the RTX 5070 Ti.
AMD says the RX 9070 will start at $549, the same price as Nvidia's RTX 5070. The slightly faster 9070 XT starts at $599, $150 less than the RTX 5070 Ti. The cards go on sale March 6, a day after Nvidia's RTX 5070.
AMD's new Radeon RX 90-series cards and the RDNA4 architecture make their official debut on March 5, and a new version of AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling technology is coming along with them.
FSR and Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) upscalers have the same goal: to take a lower-resolution image rendered by your graphics card, bump up the resolution, and fill in the gaps between the natively rendered pixels to make an image that looks close to natively rendered without making the GPU do all that rendering work. These upscalers can make errors, and they won't always look quite as good as a native-resolution image. But they're both nice alternatives to living with a blurry, non-native-resolution picture on an LCD or OLED display.
FSR and DLSS are especially useful for older or cheaper 1080p or 1440p-capable GPUs that are connected to a 4K monitor, where you'd otherwise have to decide between a sharp 4K image and a playable frame rate; it's also useful for hitting higher frame rates at lower resolutions, which can be handy for high-refresh-rate gaming monitors.
