What just happened? Advanced AI, especially the generative sort, has only been around for a few years now, though you wouldn’t think it based on AMD CTO’s blog post titled “55 years of AMD innovation,” in which the term “AI” is mentioned 23 times.
AMD celebrated its 55th birthday earlier this week. A lot has happened at the company in its more than half a century of existence, from the lawsuits against Intel and the acquisition of ATI technologies to the launch of the Ryzen CPUs that helped turn its fortunes around.
But AMD Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster chose to focus on the last five years at AMD in his post. He mentions the global sales of semiconductors growing from $412.3 billion in 2019 to $574.1 billion in 2022, the Xilinx acquisition, AMD chips being used in the latest game consoles, and the fact AMD tech powers 30% of the world’s servers and 140 of the Top500 supercomputers.
In what now appears to be a legal requirement by companies and their executives, what Papermaster really likes to talk about is AI. The 23 times he mentions it in the post, more than any other word, makes this look like a piece on AMD’s artificial intelligence program that happens to mention the company’s history, not the other way around.
Papermaster calls AI the most exciting and significant technology disruption in a lifetime. He writes that AMD was the first to market in AI PCs when it integrated a dedicated neural processing unit (NPU) on an x86 processor. He adds that the technology is aiding the company’s development by boosting productivity, thanks to AI applications in its internal workflow.
Papermaster finishes by proclaiming that AI is poised to become more ubiquitous and consequential than the advent of the Internet. He’s not the only exec to make this bold statement. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said last month that genAI will be the biggest technological revolution since the cloud, and maybe even the internet itself. The fact Amazon is going all-in on the tech is probably a big reason why he’s so confident.
The way AMD is eating Nvidia’s dust in the advanced AI hardware market mirrors the way Team Red barely has any GPUs in the Steam survey, while Nvidia dominates this category. Papermaster likely wants to emphasize in the post that the company is just as dedicated to all things AI as everyone else and isn’t focusing on the past, even if he chooses to really slam the point home.