[News Figures] AMD CEO Lisa Su Challenges Nvidia

AMD "New AI Chip Surpasses Nvidia"
CEO Lisa Su is Taiwanese-American
Majored in Electrical Engineering at MIT... Semiconductor Expert
Selected as 'Top Innovator Under 35'

American semiconductor company AMD unveiled a new artificial intelligence (AI) chip on the 13th (local time). As reports emerged that AMD's new AI chip could pose a challenge to Nvidia, attention has focused on AMD CEO Lisa Su. Nvidia specializes in semiconductor design and holds a 90% share of the global AI graphics processing unit (GPU) market.

AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) announced the release of an AI GPU (graphics processing unit) called 'MI300X,' which will be launched by the end of this year. The MI300X is based on the next-generation AMD CDNA accelerator architecture (the overall design approach of a computer system) and supports up to 192GB of HBM3 memory. It can accommodate a language model with 40 billion parameters on a single MI300X accelerator.

Lisa Su, CEO of AMD

CEO Lisa Su emphasized that the company's new AI chip surpasses Nvidia's products, suggesting that this AI chip announcement is aimed at Nvidia. She stated, "The MI300X chip offers 2.4 times the memory density and more than 1.6 times the bandwidth compared to Nvidia's H100," adding, "Large language models (LLMs) are getting bigger. Running them requires multiple GPUs. However, AMD's chip will not need many GPUs."

Currently, Nvidia holds a significant share of the GPU market. Market research firm Lifter announced in May last year that 97.4% of AI accelerators used in the world's four major cloud data centers?Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft (MS) Azure, Google Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud?were Nvidia products.

AMD has not disclosed the price of the MI300X. However, reports suggest that if AMD can gain a price advantage, it could compete with Nvidia. CNBC predicted, "Pressure may be applied to Nvidia's H100 price, which exceeds $30,000 (approximately 38 million KRW)," and added, "Lower GPU prices could help reduce the high costs of providing generative AI applications."

Lisa Su, CEO of the American semiconductor company AMD, is announcing the new artificial intelligence (AI) chip MI300X on the 13th (local time) at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco.
[Image source=Yonhap News]

Lisa Su, the CEO leading AMD in this competitive AI chip market against Nvidia, was born in Taiwan in 1969. She immigrated to the United States with her parents at the age of two. Her father was a statistician, and her mother was an accountant. As a child, she showed talent in music and was skilled enough to audition for the Juilliard School in New York.

However, she also showed great interest in engineering and entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1986. Majoring in electrical engineering, which focuses on hardware research, she was exposed to the wafer fabrication process (a core component of semiconductors) during her studies and completed both her master's and doctoral degrees at her alma mater.

After graduation, she joined IBM's semiconductor research and development department as a director in 1995, where she devised a method to replace the standard aluminum wiring in semiconductors with copper wiring. This improved data processing speed by nearly 20%, and the copper wiring material introduced by IBM in 1998 remains an industry standard today. Lisa Su worked in IBM's R&D department for 12 years until 2007, publishing over 40 semiconductor-related papers. In 2001, MIT Technology Review named her one of the "Top Innovators Under 35."

In 2011, Lisa Su joined AMD as a global business manager (vice president) and designed chips that integrated CPUs and GPUs, which made a significant impact in the video game console market. Microsoft and Sony adopted AMD's chips for their next-generation video game consoles, Xbox One and PlayStation 4, respectively. Thanks to this, AMD's performance dramatically improved, turning from a deficit to a profit in October 2013 after five quarters. In February 2017, AMD released the CPU "RYZEN," which outperformed Intel Core i processors in most performance areas except for some computer games, while being more affordable, gaining great popularity among consumers.

Meanwhile, AMD's newly unveiled chip MI300X is scheduled to be delivered as samples to major customers starting in the third quarter. AMD has not disclosed the customers for the MI300X. However, during the event, AMD showcased its technology partnerships on stage with existing collaborators such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Citadel, Hugging Face, Meta, Microsoft Azure, and PyTorch.