Will Headless Intel Woo AMD’s Lisa Su? | Hacker News Reader

Will Headless Intel Woo AMD’s Lisa Su?

eetimes.com

17 pointsbaybal248 comments

> "Su’s CES keynote had the feel of a tipping point. A star was born. She even impressed people who have known her for many years."

That's ridiculous. It's as though EETimes is pretending there have been no Ryzen keynotes in the past.

Her keynotes have been way better than the average hardware keynote for some time now.

The thing that makes her better than many others is that she clearly knows and understands the technical details of her company's products, and she comes off as genuinely stoked about how great the products are.

Ever since the first keynote I saw of her for the early Ryzen announcements, I've been making a point to watch any keynote she's done.

You have to have been sleeping to think Lisa Su only became a star at CES 2019.

Rumours of Intel acquiring AMD strike me as outlandish. I have doubts such a merger would even be approved given the monopolies that Intel would gain.

Monopoly? They would still be getting absolutely destroyed in the mobile market?

By whom? VIA?

Qualcomm presumably.

But the FTC might view the mobile market as separate from the desktop market and block a merger between Intel and AMD.

> That's ridiculous. It's as though EETimes is pretending there have been no Ryzen keynotes in the past.

Does this site have any reputation? I'm also unimpressed with publishers who make statements like

>> The first [AMD] 7-nm chip will become available next month. In contrast, Intel unveiled a 10-nm PC processor at its CES press conference.

without any qualification on how to compare feature lengths.

No please.

I do not want a monopoly in x86.

Intel is very greedy in their cpu prices. Their consumer cpu never gave the option of ecc memory and have gimp certain things. AMD was more flexible. Having two company competing will be great for the consumers.

If they could get away with it I think it would be worse than mobile games monetization

https://www.zdnet.com/article/facepalm-of-the-day-intel-char...

https://i.imgur.com/FTrP0gy.jpg

Hopefully the dismal failure of that scheme the first time around will discourage them from trying it again.

> I do not want a monopoly in x86.

Strictly speaking, x86-64 patents must be about to expire anyway - the first Intel EM64T implementation (which can be assumed to be fully compatible even with modern-day software--IIRC the original AMD64 ISA had some unfortunate quirks which make this less likely) is from 2004. So, it's only a matter of time until we see compatible x86-64 CPUs from other vendors.

There are tons of patents regarding implementation details and instruction set extensions. I don't think you could sell Athlon 64 or Pentium D clones to anyone.

Not sure about the original Athlon 64, but Pentium D's can apparently run, e.g. Win10 for x86-64 and its associated software (barring ISA extensions, of course) - surely that's good enough for some users. Especially if you could reimplement the "clone" on a more recent physical node than an actual Pentium D.

Ugh. The last thing CPU customers need is Intel without proper competition again. What Su is doing at AMD seems almost superhuman.

Perhaps the ARM world could still provide some competition.

In the x86 market? That seems like a bit of a stretch for them.

> Su, as of September 6, 2018, beneficially owns 2.43 million shares of AMD. This makes Su the firm’s largest shareholder. (https://www.investopedia.com/insights/top-3-shareholders-amd...)

Considering last year's AMD stock price development, I don't think she will leave AMD for Intel unless Intel buys AMD. But:

> Kathleen Maher, vice president at Jon Peddie Research and the editor-in-chief of JPR's TechWatch Report, told us, “Obviously, the idea of Intel acquiring AMD is something that bubbles up from time to time, as does the idea of Nvidia acquiring AMD. But in that [latter] case, forget the FTC, Europe would have a cow (or whatever).”

Yes, Su is holds half a billion bucks in AMD's stock.

This article piked my attention exactly because, if you can read in between the lines, it asks what Su can do with Intel to improve her position.

See, as pointed out in the article, any excessively concessionary move is out of the question. No Intel buying AMD, or poaching Su herself.

Nvidia may want Intel or AMD CPU

Intel may want Nvidia or AMD GPU

AMD's only interest is not to let Intel and Nvidia to combine their strong sides. She can only want "an insurance policy" against that happening, more like a castling manoeuvre.

She can take a stake in hypothesised join GPU unit with Intel, or x86 CPU unit with Nvidia.

Intel would lose nothing in that arrangement, and AMD decreases their risk in GPU.

Nvidia would lose nothing in the opposite arrangement, and AMD decreases their risk in CPU.

That's a pretty good title, in a literary sense.

The term "woo" has been used in such contexts as far back as I can remember. It's quite apt, as it's an arrangement involving many variables, the subculture of a group of people, and relatively high stakes. It's not only applied to CEOs, but high value employees. (Of both genders, might I add. I seem to recall that it's even been applied to actual princes at times.)

I think the OP wanted to say that it rhymed and had the same number of syllables per line.

Will Headless Intel Woo

AMD's Lisa Su

Also the surreal imagery. A decapitated figure courting a woman.

Why would Dr Su leave a company that is on a massive upswing, for one that has been stuck in a rut for years?

Lisa Su has a PhD in electrical engineering from MIT. She's not a medical doctor.

One sees the "Dr." moniker used by insecure lesser educational institutions. No self-respecting MIT PhD goes by doctor, unless they're an MD/PhD.

That "Doctor" all over her intro was a code smell I wasn't expecting.

"But I'll tell you what, let me give you my uncle's number. He's always eager for a challenge." ;)

Bigger risk, bigger reward, I'd think. I'd expect a pretty large offer would be needed for such a jump, but that kind of thing does happen.

Intel is multiple times larger. Also imagine how much bigger of a challenge it is to turn around Intel technology growth` (Which is infinity more profitable)

2016 is the latest numbers I can find:

Employees Intel 106k AMD 9K

Sales Intel $59.3B AMD $4.3B

Intel has been doing great as a business... In the sense of increasing margins and making customers pay for every little thing. (Except for integrated graphics, which are worthless, see

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-f-series-9th-gen-pro... )

Intel's "headlesless" is a consequence of harvesting for years.

I wouldn’t call it worthless. Unless you’re a gamer or AI/ML-geek they are perfectly adequate for regular desktop needs like browsing the web or writing code.

I certainly don’t long for a descrete GPU.

In fact this is the only thing I miss going to Ryzen. Now I’ll have to buy a GPU.

His link describes why they are worthless.

The fact that they’re effectively giving them away for free still don't make them worthless though.

> His link describes why they are worthless.

His link only describes why they are worthless to the author of that article. It hardly means that they are worthless to the market at large.

I welcome Intel discrete GPUs. If they are as fast as Nvidia's or AMD's, I'd consider buying one. The high end/gaming PC GPU market needs more players.

Half of the effort with high end gaming GPUs is the driver support after the fact, something Intel has traditionally put only minimal effort into. Buying a high end Intel card for gaming would likely doom you to poor performance and crashes on many new games.

There are many cases where the Intel hardware should be sufficient to play a game, but some driver weirdness makes it unplayable anyway.

There is a line of Ryzens with integrated GPU:

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/263683-amd-ryzen-5-240...

Sure. But those are effectively lower end models and I find it a shame AMD don’t ship GPUs on the CPUs with higher core-counts.

> Except for integrated graphics, which are worthless

What!?

Not the OP, but I think they used "worthless" to mean that they are not bringing in any extra revenue over CPUs with no integrated graphics (see the link).

What, no non-competes for executives? (only partly sarcastic)

AMD already licensed CPUs to another manufacturer in China. Any premium spent to acquire AMD would not be worth it quite quickly.

Buying AMD to get rid of their only remaining x86 competitor would be worth a very high premium. I don't get what that licensing deal, with a manufacturer that is only allowed to sell in China, has to do with it.

Micron is in this situation now. It is under threat from UMC, which got ahold of tech by way of MMT joint venture. There are three mainland competitors as well with local government sponsorship. Just project this on CPU market.

Can we please not use the term "WOO" just because AMD's CEO happens to be a woman ? Just don't. It's not hard.

Can we please not use the term "WOO" just because AMD's CEO happens to be a woman ? Just don't. It's not hard.

Can we please not imagine there is sexism just because there is some stretchy reference which can be made to marital traditions? Just don't. It's not hard.

"Woo" is often used in this very context, with both male and female employees, and has been since as far back as I can remember. In fact, it's not just used for CEOs, it's also used in the vernacular for anything involving finding personnel, where the variables are complex and the stakes are relatively high.

I've seen it used plenty for men too though. Ironically they were probably seduced (wooed if you will) more by the rhyme (woo/Su).

Mind you I still object to it, but on aesthetic grounds, i.e. it's lazy & cliché. "SoHo eateries woo Millenial foodies" would be my best attempt at a 100% cliché headline.

There's nothing sexist about the word woo. Try doing a search of news articles and you'll clearly see that woo is used to refer to men, women, and groups regularly.

Here's one example from earlier this year: https://triblive.com/sports/columnists/timbenz/breakfastwith... "First call: NFC Pro Bowler trying to woo Steelers' Antonio Brown to 49ers?"

You're the one making that connection. Not the reporters. Reporters also say that companies are "woo'ing" male executives all the time.

I also wouldn't care if they were actually using gendered language but this isn't even an instance of that. More likely they used the word "Woo" for the sake of wordplay with the name "Lisa Su"

I think there are plenty of cases of this being used for men, for companies etc. Also, Junko Yoshida is a woman and, given the thin staffing of EE times these days, probably writes the headlines as well.

In short, I think this is OK. But I also upvoted your comment because I think it's worth discussing.

> google search 'woo site:cnn.com', first hits doing the wooing or getting wooed are:

1) 'Bachelor' fans

2) a male peanut seller

3) Trump

4) Trump

5) Trump

> google search 'woo site:foxnews.com', first hits doing the wooing or getting wooed are:

1) John McCain

2) Doctors

3) Bernie Sanders

4) Retailers

5) SeaWorld

> google search 'woo site:news.bbc.co.uk', first hits doing the wooing or getting wooed are:

1) US

2) US

3) Hwang-Woo-suk

4) Clinton and Obama

5) Japanese hotels

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