The Six Five On the Road with Forrest Norrod at AMD Advancing AI

Great to see you, Pat. Good to see you, Dan.

Yeah, we definitely think today was an incredible day. It was a culmination from our point of view, not just of what's been going on this last year, but quite candidly, we introduced MI300. We've been working on it for over five years. People sometimes don't appreciate the complexity of these chips and what we're trying to do, so that these multi-generational roadmaps get set in place years in advance. Particularly for the MI300A, which has some really interesting technology—the chiplets, the mix of processes, the large package, the combination of CPU and GPU together—we've been working on it for a long time. So for us, it was an incredible day to have that culminate not just in a launch, but in really strong customer acceptance and the excitement of our customers. We've gotten not just the silicon, but all the work we've been doing on the software as well has come together at one point where the excitement of AI is there. That's the thing: we didn't know five years ago. We believed that this AI inflection point would happen at some point, but you don't know when. So when we started this journey, we didn't know that the whole world would be revolving around generative AI today, and the whole world would be saying, 'Thank heavens that AMD is offering us a really solid, complete AI solution—hardware and software—that gives me choice and also helps foster innovation across the industry.'

Well, I think first off, we think open is absolutely crucial. As a company that's long been the underdog, we've always been open, we've always been partnering. The reason is that quite frankly, we think that's where the most value and the most innovation flows—from open ecosystems where others can come together and add value and add new ideas to your platform. So we think, to my mind, open versus completely proprietary and locked down: if you're proprietary and locked down, that's a statement that you believe that your engineers are smarter than everybody else's in the entire industry combined. That's right. And we certainly have never been arrogant enough to think that. So we think open is critical. We also hear that in spades from our customers. They want open platforms so that they can add value, so that they can add their own innovations around the ecosystem, and also so that they're not locked into something proprietary that maybe has unfavorable economics.

For us, people have talked for most of the last decade about how Moore's law is under threat and it's slowing down, and that the traditional way we used to get more capability and more price performance was just to rely on the process—just get more transistors. They've been talking about how that's been slowing down. At AMD, I'd say we looked at it very dispassionately almost a decade ago and said, 'Yeah, you're right.' And therefore—and that's a step that a lot of people didn't take—therefore we have to do it differently. We have to embrace chiplets. We have to look at how certain types of logic and other functions scale differently as the process generations continue. So we're going to want to have chiplets of different processes mixed together in one package in order to continue to deliver the most performance, price performance, and power efficiency. Once you accept that you're going to have to do that, packaging becomes the obvious new critical thing that you have to focus on. It was almost an afterthought in years past, but now it's central to how you design these chips, how you design these systems. So we invested massively. I think we're generally four or five years at least ahead of most of the industry in terms of embracing this technology. You see Intel now with Sapphire Rapids going to a four-die topology very similar to what we did in the first generation EPYC products back in 2017. They're going to advance it rapidly as well, but they've begun that journey. We think everybody doing high-performance parts is going to go after advanced packaging—2D and 3D over time—but we think we're ahead.

So the first one that we're super proud of is Frontier, which took over the number one position on the Top500 about a year and a half ago. That was MI250 in a third-generation EPYC derivative part. You're right, we really won that deal three or four years earlier. You're working with the labs, you're working with your design partner. In this case, for both Frontier and El Capitan, it was HPE—well, actually it was Cray to begin with at that time, and then Hewlett Packard Enterprise. But you're doing advanced design, and the customer has to bet on the credibility of what you're saying long before anything exists. We viewed both projects as incredibly important for AMD in terms of our ambitions on HPC, our ability to have flagship design wins to anchor our roadmap, as well as drive us quite frankly, and getting partners, particularly in the HPC realm, aligned to our software ecosystem to help flesh out the overall solution. So we were super proud of Frontier. Seeing it still number one on the Top500 a year and a half later—the first opportunity, it'll be number one for at least two years. I haven't seen that before, but maybe I'm not paying attention long enough. Something has been there for so long. But that's a little unusual. We think the next big system from us is El Capitan, based on MI300A. That's a really cool part because it combines both the CPU and the GPU together in one package. The strong feedback from the HPC customers was that that really can help speed up their applications. I think that's why they entrusted that design to us. We're building it now, and I can't wait to see it go live next year.

Thank you.

I'd say the pace is incredible. By the way, it is a challenge for many institutions. You see the pace of AI hardware picking up. You'll see annual introductions now of new AI hardware, which is akin to the PC industry. But the machines, the systems that these are going into, are fantastically more complex than that. It's difficult for many organizations, customers, and partners to absorb that rate of change. What I think you'll see is that many customers will skip a generation. They'll still deploy every other year, but they'll be out of phase with each other overall. Customers are struggling to deal with this rate of innovation, but they're so excited at the promise of what AI can bring to everything and the productivity enhancements that we can see. It's an absolute imperative for everybody across the industry to move as fast as they possibly can. The things we've seen from the productivity even internally—we've got about a hundred AI projects underway internally. By that, I mean where AMD is using AI. We're seeing massive things like hiring, sales, all of those, but also on the engineering side for design, for validation, for compatibility checks. There are all sorts of different applications, and we're seeing massive productivity enhancements which is helping us design faster to maintain this fast rate. It also gives us a lot of confidence that this is not a bubble, not a flash in the pan. The productivity enhancements that are being promised out of AI really are coming and justify increased investment in it. So I think it's going to be an exciting few years for sure.

Well, thank you guys. Really appreciate it. Thanks for coming.