AMD's CTO: Intel is an old-school company
Monterey (CA) - AMD is going through challenging times these days, with enormous losses on the one side and a new quad-core CPU that needs to re-establish the firm's competitiveness with Intel on the other. We recently caught up with Phil Hester and got answers to some of our questions about AMD - the competition with Intel, the strategy behind the Fusion processor. Join us for a chat with AMD's chief technology officer.
AMD has not really been very talkative about its strategy and upcoming products lately. The silence has put the company in an awkward situation, in which Intel's marketing is running under full steam promoting the 45 nm processor generation while people interested in AMD's plans could only speculate how well its next-generation processors will compete against Intel. What we have seen in recent weeks, were lots of rumors among journalists and our readers, but also increasingly impatient investors who grilled AMD executives at the firm's investor meeting.
At a press briefing last week, we used the opportunity to get answers to some of our most burning questions about the current competitive environment, from the man in charge of technology at AMD. We discussed AMD's current and near future challenges, opportunities and hurdles for the 2009 Fusion processor, the impact of the discussion about 45 nm, and we were able to throw in a few other questions such as AMD's thoughts on Apple.
Image Phil Hester
Phil Hester, is senior vice president and chief technology officer (CTO) at AMD. He is responsible for setting the architectural and product strategies and plans for AMD's microprocessor business. According to his biography posted on AMD's website, he also chairs the AMD Technology Council, ensuring that product development, integration, and process organizations align technology capabilities with product direction.
Before joining AMD in September of 2005, Hester was co-founder and chief executive officer at Newisys and spent 23 years at IBM.
TG Daily: Let's begin with a general view on the microprocessor industry. Where do you see AMD's status today?
Phil Hester: We are in a very competitive position. There is a very fierce competition between us and Intel. You have two healthy competitors here; you are going to see companies ping-pong back and forth. You are not going to see one dominate like they have in the past. The world has become different with the success of our Opteron processor. Going forward, I believe there is a large opportunity for us on the consumer side of graphics. Overall, we feel very good about our manufacturing capabilities and we feel good about our new designs.
TG Daily: AMD is in a difficult time right now and you are facing many competitive challenges. One of the prominent ones appears to be that, according to recent statements from various AMD executives, Intel has been copying AMD. What is your view on this? Is Intel copying AMD?
Phil Hester: More and more so, yes. And that indicates to me that we are doing the right thing. We are going to continue to have a customer centric view of the world. They go wherever they want to go. But we focus on building customer centric products.
TG Daily: So, if you accuse Intel of copying AMD, what exactly did they copy?
Phil Hester: More and more they figured out that Itanium is a ditch. Obviously, they copied our 64-bit extensions. A lot of the work we have done on virtualization they copied. A lot of the work we have done on power efficiency they copied. By doing Torrenza, we forced them to do what is their version of that idea. We don't know a whole lot about [their version] yet, but, in general, they soon will be copying the idea of co-processors. So, every major platform innovation we came out within the last two years, in one form or the other, they copied.
TG Daily: It appears that the microprocessor industry, especially in the case of AMD and Intel, is in a pattern of switching the lead. For some time, AMD was in the lead in certain markets, now it is Intel and we may see AMD jumping ahead later this year again. Is this rock-solid pattern or do you think that this pattern can be broken and one company can keep the lead for a longer period of time?
Phil Hester: If there is an open competition, there ought to be a horse race back and forth between two strong competitors. That is what is good about us competing in the industry. But if Intel engages in business practices that may not allow fair and open competition, then there is no a serious problem not just for us, but the whole industry.
Read on the next page: The acquisition of ATI, Intel's advantages and disadvantages, and Fusion
