AMD Keynote at CES

As I said in my post about CES last week (see my post Consumer Electronics: 5G, AI, and Air Taxis), I'm not sure if can read anything into it but the "semiconductor" keynote was given by AMD and not, as historically been the case, Intel. Oh, and another thing that I missed is that CES is no longer the Consumer Electronics Show, it is plain CES (like IBM is no longer International Business Machines, it is just IBM).

Real Women Don't Have Fabs

Twenty years ago, AMD's founder and then CEO Jerry Sanders disparaged the growing foundry/fabless ecosystem with the catch-phrase "real men have fabs." What he meant was that leading edge designs (like the fastest microprocessors) required design and manufacturing to work together, and that this could not be done if manufacturing was a foundry. In that era, in any case, foundries were a couple of process generations behind. In Jerry's era, we simply called companies like AMD "semiconductor companies" since all semiconductor companies had both design and manufacturing. The fabless semiconductor companies were not considered to be real semiconductor companies. In fact, the SIA, the Semiconductor Industry Association, would not admit them as members. So they created their own, the FSA, the Fabless Semiconductor Association. Now, the fabless model is so dominant that we have a special name for those "real men with fabs" companies, we call them IDMs or Integrated Device Manufacturers. And the FSA became GSA, the Global Semiconductor Alliance—you can join even if you have a fab.

Fabs started to become a liability. Many system companies with semiconductor divisions started by spinning them out as separate companies. For example, Motorola spun out SPD to create Freescale, Siemens spun out its semiconductor divisions to create Infineon (and the best-forgotten Qimonda memory company). I think that this was mainly financial: fabs got too expensive, and were a real liability if the system side of the business could not keep the fab full. It wasn't just that the number of dollars had gone up, it was also that the size of an economically viable fab had gone up. Today it is upwards of 50,000 wafer-starts per month (wpm). Those are 300mm wafers too, so it is the equivalent of 100,000 wpm of the prior generation 8" wafers. Few system companies can keep a fab that size full over its 3-5 year lifetime.

But Jerry was also right, that at the leading edge, design (and EDA and IP) would need to work closely with manufacturing. Foundries became virtual manufacturing departments. Big customers moved whole teams into the foundries' buildings to handle the co-operation.

Ironically, AMD was the first IDM to get rid of its fabs completely, in a deal where it spun its manufacturing arm in a joint venture with the Abu Dhabi government's ATIC investment arm to create GLOBALFOUNDRIES (and, with my old printing and typography heritage of my youth, I can recommend that if your company has a long name do not have a style standard that it should always be in uppercase—it is ugly). The second irony was that I think they were the first major semiconductor company to appoint a woman as CEO in Lisa Su. I nearly titled this post using the phrase "real women don't have fabs" before I realized that without the history, it wouldn't make sense to anyone who wasn't in the industry in the early 1990s.

On the Wednesday of CES, it was Lisa who took the stage.

AMD Keynote

Lisa was introduced as "Fortune 2018 Business Person of the Year". Although it makes her sound unique, there are actually 20 of them. But the semiconductor industry did well with not only Lisa, but also Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia. and Pat Gelsinger, now CEO of VMWare but ex-CTO of Intel. Tech in general had lots more in Adobe, TenCent, Amazon, PayPal, and Geely Automobile (not sure if that counts as tech yet, but there is so much electronics in a car now that it seemed like half of CES was automotive-related).

Lisa opened by saying that it was the first time AMD has given a keynote at CES. This year, 2019, is AMD's 50th anniversary too. It was founded on May 1st 1969 by the aforementioned Jerry Sanders, along with seven other colleagues from Fairchild Semiconductor. For more on that early history, see my post from last year The Birthplace of Silicon Valley: 391 South San Antonio Road.

AMD has had several milestones over the years. The most industry-changing was in 2003 with the first 64-bit x86 processor. This was in the era when Intel decided that the future was Itanium. Spoiler alert: it wasn't. So today, every Intel server chip runs what is officially the AMD 64-bit ISA.

Lisa's AMD keynote was very different from the Intel keynotes and presentations I've seen over the years. You would hardly know Intel was a semiconductor company, in amongst all the mountain bikers, drones, and fashion designers. Lisa talked about chips the whole time, and even when guest speakers came on stage, they were talking about the importance of high-end performance for things like movie production and video game creation. This did mean that her keynote was not truly what I consider a keynote, but more of a commercial pitch for the AMD product line. But since I don't know the product line that well, it was fascinating to me. So, with that caveat, here is much of what she said.

I've seen interviews with Lisa where she has made the point that:

What’s so exciting about tech is we have to decide beforehand. We have to make decisions 3, 4, 5 years ahead. And we don’t know if they are going to work. Frankly. 2019 is a key year when some of our big bets really pay off.

AMD was not in good shape when Lisa took over in 2014. She restructured the company, including a big layoff. The stock was around $5 when she took over, and last year it was as high as $34 at one point. Today it is around $20, so up 300% during her watch.

AMD seems to divide the market up into three (or at least Lisa divided the keynote up this way).

In the PC space, there is an installed base of 1.5B PCs and the PC market continues to be important. This is especially true at the high end where consumers love the productivity (for things like VR/AR, creative work, and gaming). In 2017 the best processor for creators had 10 cores and cost over $1700. AMD created Threadripper, now the highest-selling high-end desktop processor. For that same $1700 you know get 32 cores, 64 threads, and leadership IO and memory bandwidth.

Ultra-thin notebooks are the fastest growin PC category and 160M of them will be sold this year. Their vision is to bring desktop performance to a thin notebook with all-day battery life. Lisa said AMD showed the Ryzen mobile processor last year, and this year they announced the second generation in 12nm manufacturing, still the fastest processor for ultra-thin notebooks.

Lisa says that she is passionate about gamers. Given the cheers and applause, a large segment of the audience were equally passionate. AMD is the only company that delivers CPUs and GPUs for consoles, PCs, and cloud gaming.

Lisa brought out Phil Spencer, head of gaming at Microsoft. He pointed out that gaming has truly become a mainstream form of entertainment. There are 4B connected consumers and about 2B of them play video games. Most youth gets their first introduction to computers through gaming.

Lisa made her first announcement:

Today I’m happy to show you our new high end GPU for gamers and creators, Radeon Vii. World’s first 7nm GPU.

That Vii is a roman numeral and pronounced "seven". In 7nm. I continue to think that Intel is making a major marketing mistake by continuing to call its roughly equivalent process 10nm, allowing everyone else to talk about the first 7nm process, GPU, AI processor, and more. Anyway, the Radeon Vii has 60 compute units running at up to 1.8GHz, 16GB of high bandwdith memory, 1TB/s memory bandwidth. It delivers 25% more performance at the same power. To prove how real it was, she had a live demo of Devil May Cry 5 running at 4K with a frame rate way above 60 frames per second, with truly photorealistic characters.

Her next guest was David Poleldt, who is head of Ubisoft's Massive Entertainment Studio. He is based in Sweden, and it was his first time in Vegas:

You guys have created what most gamers play on.  The Division was our biggest launch, we are now working on Division 2.

He pointed out that CPU and GPU performance are really important on the PC. "At the end of the day, all games are created on PCs, even if many are played on consoles." He said that The Division 2 actually launches in March but all us keynote attendees got our free copy as we walked out.

Still on the game theme, Fnatic cofounder Sam Mathes came on to talk about e-sports. This is basically watching people playing video games. It is the fastest growing spectator sport and 6.6B hours were spent watching last year:

It really is the new world sport, captivating millions across the world, as widespread as many traditional sports. Over 99 million people watched the world final of Leage of Legends.

Next, it was on to servers and high-performance computing (HPC). In 2017 AMD introduced the Epyc server processor with...well, more of everything. Microsoft and AWS offer Epyc on their most powerful cloud instances, and it just takes about 4 minutes to migrate.

Lisa pre-announced second-generation Epyc, that will be "the best server processor the world has ever seen." It is manufactured in 7nm, with 2X the performance per socket, 4X the floating point performance. It fits the same socket and the same platform so upgrading is really easy. She showed the graph above showing how far it is above the line of datacenter performance (although, to be fair, she's comparing a future product with currently shipping products, but impressive nonetheless).

I'm happy to announce that the second generation processor is absolutely on track and we will start shipping in the middle of 2019.

She returned to Ryzen for her big finale, the first public preview of what next-generation Ryzen can do. The above picture shows the two die in a single package. The smaller one is the processor and the larger is their IO die specifically supporting PCIe gen 4. It will launch in the middle of 2019.

Lisa finished on a personal note:

I love semiconductors, and what semconductors can do for the world. How can we push the limits? Problems are also opportunities. High-performance computing is enabling the worlds greatest engineers and scientists to solve new problems.

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