Author/Zheng Luan
"When I was a young engineer at IBM, it was suggested that I should study this problem. If you want to do it, you must do the most important thing. I will always remember. "
This sentence comes from lisa su, a China woman and president and CEO of AMD.
Lisa su has been the CEO of AMD since 20 14. During her tenure, AMD's share price rose from about $2 to $90 today, an increase of 4,500% in five years.
She did solve many problems faced by AMD at that time. Today, AMD has completely subverted the CPU market of personal computers, surpassed Intel in technology and performance, and impacted Intel in the market of data center (once server) processors. 20 19 sulisha became the first woman in history to appear on the annual CEO salary list of the associated press.
Another headache for Intel is its loyal younger brother NVIDIA.
NVIDIA just bought British new product design company ARM from Softbank for $40 billion, which is the biggest acquisition in the history of chips. Once the acquisition is completed, it means that NVIDIA can directly compete with Intel in the CPU market and threaten Intel's important profit source-the data center market.
Huang Renxun, the founder of NVIDIA, is also from China. In the circle of computer hardware lovers, he and Su Lisha are called "Lao Huang" and "Ma Su".
Intel's current situation is not smooth, and its research and development progress is not smooth, which makes it difficult to keep up with the "Moore's Law" proposed by its ancestors, and its share price is no longer strong.
Will these two China people become grave diggers of the technology giant Intel?
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The youngest billionaire in Silicon Valley
1965, while preparing a report, Gordon Moore, one of Intel's future founders, found an amazing rule: every 18-24 months, the number of circuits on integrated circuit chips would double. This phenomenon exists not only in memory chips, but also in microprocessors.
If this law takes effect for a long time, it means that the storage capacity and computing power of computers will double every two years.
This is the famous Moore's Law, which accurately predicts the development of computer performance in the next 50 years and becomes the first law in the computer field.
That year, two-year-old Huang Renxun still lived with his family in Taipei. At that time, Intel was not born, and there were still four years before lisa su was born.
This is a history of love and killing each other.
1968, Gordon Moore, robert noyce and Andy Grove left Fairchild Semiconductor and founded Intel. Some media commented that Intel is one of the most successful and competitive companies on the planet. Just like a precise machine, it never makes mistakes.
Intel followed the development track predicted by Moore's Law almost perfectly, breaking the waves like an aircraft carrier. AMD, on the other hand, has played the role of a challenger who has repeatedly lost and fought.
For decades, AMD has been playing the role of the "second supplier" in the chip industry, sometimes authorized by Intel, and sometimes by shanzhai. It was not until the 1980s and 1990s that Intel cancelled the technical authorization for AMD, and AMD embarked on the road of independent research and development, killing all its competitors and becoming Intel's only enemy in the CPU market.
In the second half of the 20th century, the rapid development of semiconductor industry became the most important engine of American economy. Huang Renxun and Surisha followed their families from Taiwan Province Province, China to the United States across the ocean.
Huang Renxun received a degree in electrical engineering from Oregon State University and a master's degree from Stanford University. After graduation, he briefly worked for AMD.
From 65438 to 0985, Huang Renxun joined LSI Logic. In eight years, from an ordinary employee to a director, he was responsible for many departments such as technology and sales, and became a compound talent.
1993, before his 30th birthday, Huang Renxun co-founded NVIDIA, whose main business is display chips. Driven by NVIDIA, display chips have jumped from dispensable products to two core processors of computers.
This year, Sulisha has not graduated from MIT. In this famous American school, lisa su studied for 8 years and obtained bachelor's degree, master's degree and doctor's degree in electrical engineering.
Su Lisha has worked in TI, IBM R&D department and Freescale Semiconductor Company. She was appraised as good at negotiation, strong leadership, rich interpersonal relationship and versatile.
Before 1995, display chips were mainly used in game machines, because personal computers at that time had almost no game functions. When Microsoft released Windows95, the computer graphics era came, and the graphics card began to take the "C position" in the chip industry.
Huang Renxun's keen sense of smell made him decide to fully support Microsoft's D3D API. At the same time, he also put forward the "Yellow Law" in the field of graphics chips, also known as Moore's Law, that is, the performance of graphics chips doubles every six months.
Graphics card used to be only a component responsible for signal output, but with the development of computer performance, the importance of graphics card chip is increasing.
1999, NVIDIA put forward the concept of GPU (graphics processor) and released a brand-new product GeForce256. This chip is considered to be the world's first consumer-grade 3D graphics GPU.
Huang Renxun's series of decisions made NVIDIA stand out in the graphics card market, and he himself became the youngest billionaire in the history of Silicon Valley.
In 2006, when AMD was able to compete head-on with Intel in the CPU market, the company made an amazing decision-it spent $5.4 billion to acquire ATI, one of NVIDIA's biggest competitors, which made AMD the only manufacturer in the world capable of developing and producing CPU and graphics cards.
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The savior of AMD
In the long run, AMD's acquisition has far-reaching influence and long-term value. Today, AMD is still the only company in the world that can develop CPU and discrete graphics card at the same time. In the case of slower and slower CPU performance, the computing power of graphics card still has a lot of imagination, and it has unique advantages in floating-point computing, artificial intelligence and other fields.
But at the time of acquisition, AMD was the second in the CPU market and ATI was the second in the graphics card market. The completion of this acquisition means that AMD needs to fight on two fronts. The second child buys the second child and competes directly with the two bosses. This is a very dangerous business operation.
The tight capital chain directly affects AMD's R&D capability. In the CPU market, AMD's performance gradually lags behind Intel's. In 2008, in order to ensure the company's operation, AMD was forced to sell its own wafer factory, which made AMD no longer have wafer production capacity and became a pure chip design company.
In the graphics card market, AMD has also fallen behind in the competition with NVIDIA. AMD was once synonymous with "cost performance" because it could not provide competitive products.
In 20 14 years, AMD has been in turmoil, and its market value has dropped from the highest of 75 billion dollars to less than 3 billion dollars. It hasn't recovered from four consecutive CEO changes.
Lei Jun once said that no mobile phone brand can successfully reverse after the decline in sales, except Xiaomi. This general trend is also true in the whole field of science and technology. Almost everyone thinks that AMD will disappear from the historical stage after a few years of survival.
Fortunately, AMD found a savior.
In 20 12, AMD hired lisa su from Freescale, who successively served as chief operating officer, senior vice president and general manager of global business at AMD, and became the first female CEO in the history of AMD in the reorganization in June of 20 14.
Although the outside world thinks that AMD is under siege, lisa su has a different view: AMD has high-performance computing technology and core intellectual property rights, and chips that define the next generation of CPU and GPU, despite its poor operating conditions. This is the stage that engineer Sulisha dreamed of.
In order to reverse losses, AMD began to provide Sony and Microsoft with semi-custom chips for game consoles. This business has a low profit margin and is despised by Intel and NVIDIA. AMD has both CPU and discrete graphics business, which is very suitable for this custom chip. This move quickly provided AMD with a stable cash flow.
At the same time, Sulisha focuses on solving AMD's most fatal problem, because she knows that "problems are opportunities". Lisa su put forward three strategies for AMD: building great products, deepening the relationship with customers and partners, and simplifying operations.
Lisa su hopes that AMD will invest its resources in large and important markets, including data centers, personal computers and games. The overall market size is expected to be as high as $75 billion.
There are two measures to seize these important markets: launching new products on time and focusing on developing high-performance chips. AMD began to implement a new product cycle, with a new generation of GPU and a new generation of CPU every year and a half.
Lisa su recalled two meritorious veterans of AMD, Jim Keller, who participated in and led the design of CPU architecture, and Wang, a Chinese who worked in AMD for 12 years and led the design of graphics chips for a long time. They were responsible for the research and development of AMD's next-generation CPU and graphics architecture respectively.
AMD has also set up a special business development committee and engineering design leading team to regularly review AMD's roadmap to ensure that all investments are in the right direction and provide customers with the most suitable products at the right time.
2065438+On February 2, 20071,at the AMD Ruilong Technology Day Conference held in San Francisco, lisa su smiled and released the Ryzen processor with a new architecture. The new architecture makes AMD's products competitive again, and its cost performance is higher than Intel's products.
Half a year later, the financial report released by AMD showed that the company gradually got rid of losses and made profits again.
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Intel is under siege.
Su Lisha's footsteps did not stop.
After AMD released a brand-new personal computer CPU, it radiated the new architecture and new technology to other markets, including the data center mentioned by lisa su, as well as commercial computers, notebook computers and other markets.
After getting on the right track, AMD broke out with amazing potential. They chose to cooperate with TSMC and bet on the 7-nanometer process, thus quickly surpassing Intel.
20 19, this is the 50th birthday of AMD and lisa su. AMD was very proud this year, releasing the world's first 7-nanometer desktop processor, and the graphics card also entered the 7-nanometer process. What makes AMD proud is that its technology integration covers notebook computers, desktop computers, cloud computing, high-performance computing (HPC) and next-generation game consoles. This has become the reason why AMD's profits and share price have soared.
In the context of AMD's outstanding performance, Intel has been exhausted. Due to poor research and development, Intel's process of 14 nm was stagnant for five years, and it was not until this year that the product of 10 nm was launched, but its performance was still poor.
In July this year, NVIDIA's market value surpassed Intel's $250 billion, and has since risen to more than $320 billion. Not long ago, Intel's third-quarter financial report poured cold water on investors: revenue decreased by 4.5% year-on-year and 7.1%quarter-on-quarter; Gross profit margin decreased by 5.7% year-on-year; Net profit decreased by 28.6% year on year.
As of February 29th, 12, Intel's market value once fell below the $200 billion mark, and barely recovered with the help of hedge funds.
Despite its abundant cash flow, Intel seems to have reached the edge of the cliff. In the field of processor manufacturing, Intel has been unable to keep pace with TSMC and Samsung, while personal computers and data center CPUs are constantly being robbed by AMD.
To make matters worse, traditional customers of Intel, such as Apple, Microsoft and Amazon, are already developing their own internal chip solutions, which are made by TSMC and Samsung.
165438+1At the end of October, Apple introduced the M 1 chip based on ARM architecture. The performance of this processor has surpassed i9-9980HK of 16-inch MacBook Pro in many scenarios, and its power consumption performance is also better than Intel's processor. Will Apple replace the whole line of Macbook products with its own processor in the future?
So far, AMD and NVIDIA are the biggest threats to Intel. Under the leadership of lisa su, AMD returned to the data center processor market and raised its strategic position to an unprecedented height, calling its new products "the strongest x86 processor in the world" and "the new standard of modern data center".
This market is Intel's cash cow and growth engine, accounting for 52% of Intel's revenue in the second quarter. AMD's products based on 7 nm process are clearly ahead of Intel.
NVIDIA, headed by Huang Renxun, is still growing rapidly after its market value surpassed that of Intel, and now it has exceeded $320 billion, leaving Intel far behind. The main reason is that NVIDIA has been ahead in the application of artificial intelligence with broad prospects, while Intel has been slow to enter these scenes.
Ten years ago, David Kirk, the chief scientist of NVIDIA, persuaded Huang Renxun to make a series of crazy decisions that seemed risky at that time. The first is to turn the discrete graphics card that can only render graphics into a general-purpose GPU (GPGPU); On the other hand, it is strongly required that all existing and upcoming GPUs of NVIDIA must support CUDA programs.
CUDA is a general parallel computing architecture introduced by NVIDIA, which enables GPU to solve complex computing problems. It makes the GPU no longer exist alone in the graphics card of individual users, but only work for its own "one acre and three points"; Instead, it makes the GPU universal and turns the "personal computer" into a "supercomputer" that can perform parallel operations.
At present, NVIDIA has developed and accumulated a large number of algorithms and software for different fields based on CUDA, and the mainstream deep learning framework in the field of artificial intelligence is basically based on CUDA for GPU parallel acceleration.
Today, NVIDIA's acquisition of ARM has the opportunity to enter the data center processor market that Intel and AMD compete for; On the other hand, Arm is the world's largest chip ip supplier, and more than 90% of the world's mobile phones and tablet processors adopt ARM architecture. If this transaction is finally completed, NVIDIA will become a technology company spanning many important fields such as servers, personal computers, consumer electronics and smart phones.
I'm afraid it's not only Intel that doesn't want to see this transaction completed, but also the big customers of ARM such as Apple, Samsung and Qualcomm.
For Intel, it faces another major crisis since it was founded 52 years ago. Intel has never met do or die. In the late 1970s, Intel, a storage-oriented company, decisively cut off its storage business and entered the processor market. The cooperation with Microsoft broke IBM's monopoly on personal computers and became a world-class technology giant.
Today's Intel, once again came to the crossroads of fate, but the legendary CEO andy grove has left Intel for 20 years.
This time, who can lead Intel out of the trough?