Lisa Su, AMD’s chief executive officer, has been sharing her thoughts on the company’s success, and believes that AMD will go from strength to strength in 2020.
Su indicated this – and a lot more besides – in an interview with VentureBeat following AMD’s strong Q3 financial results (which witnessed the highest quarterly revenue in almost 15 years).
- Ryzen 9 3950X overclocked blows away Intel Core i9-9900K
- Intel CPUs aren't safe unless you disable hyper-threading?
- These are all the best processors
Answering a question about how AMD aims to stay competitive – particularly with Intel soon to launch new processors on several fronts – Su made the obvious move to highlight AMD’s incoming 3rd-gen Threadripper chips, as well as the imminent flagship Ryzen 9 3950X which is set to make a big entrance at the consumer high-end.
She then pointed to next-gen 7nm (Zen 2) mobile processors arriving in early 2020 to pep things up for laptops, and concluded that all this represented a “pretty strong portfolio”, before adding: “We’re well underway with Zen 3 as a follow-on, as well, for 2020 – lots of product activity. Even though 2019 was a big product year, I think 2020 will be an even larger product year for us.”
That isn’t just in terms of laptop and desktop Ryzen processors, but also Epyc CPUs which are truly worrying Intel in the data center arena, and of course in the console world where AMD is in both next-gen consoles from Microsoft and Sony (machines which are arriving in 2020).
Smart move
And in the smartphone world, of course, we recently heard that Samsung may include AMD’s Radeon rDNA graphics in its phones in just two years’ time. Responding to a question about how this was an exciting opportunity, but whether it was an IP licensing opportunity, or an actual supplying the chips to Samsung opportunity, Su replied: “The way to think about it, we want Radeon graphics to be everywhere. Everywhere means in the data center, in gaming, in PCs, in consoles, as well as in mobile.”
And indeed it looks very much like this is going to be the case as we move forward into 2020 (and probably 2021 on the smartphone front). As to whether the Samsung partnership is just a licensing opportunity, Su noted that “it’s both a licensing opportunity, as well as a development opportunity, where we’re jointly optimizing our Radeon graphics for lower-power applications”.
Naturally, you’d expect the CEO of any company to big up the prospects of their firm looking forward, but it’s difficult to argue against AMD making further strides in all these various hardware arenas.
