Intel Corp. (INTC) and AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) today announced the creation of an x86 ecosystem advisory group bringing together technology leaders to shape the future of the world's most widely used computing architecture. x86 is uniquely positioned to meet customers' emerging needs by delivering superior performance and seamless interoperability across hardware and software platforms. The group will focus on identifying new ways to expand the x86 ecosystem by enabling compatibility across platforms, simplifying software development, and providing developers with a platform to identify architectural needs and features to create innovative and scalable solutions for the future.

For over four decades, x86 has served as the bedrock of modern computing, establishing itself as the preferred architecture in data centers and PCs worldwide. In today's evolving landscape - characterized by dynamic AI workloads, custom chiplets, and advancements in 3D packaging and system architectures - the importance of a robust and expanding x86 ecosystem is more crucial than ever.

Today, AMD announced "Advancing AI 2024," an in-person and livestreamed event on October 10, 2024 to showcase the next-generation AMD Instinct accelerators and 5th Gen AMD EPYC server processors, as well as Networking and AI PC updates, in addition to highlighting the Company's growing AI solutions ecosystem. AMD executives and AI ecosystems partners, customers and developers will join Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su to discuss how AMD products and software are reshaping the AI and high-performance computing landscape. The live stream will start at 9:00 a.m. PT/12:00 p.m. ET on Thursday, October 10

AMD today announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire ZT Systems, a leading provider of AI infrastructure for the world's largest hyperscale computing companies. The strategic transaction marks the next major step in AMD's AI strategy to deliver leadership AI training and inferencing solutions based on innovating across silicon, software and systems. ZT Systems' extensive experience designing and optimizing cloud computing solutions will also help cloud and enterprise customers significantly accelerate the deployment of AMD-powered AI infrastructure at scale. AMD has agreed to acquire ZT Systems in a cash and stock transaction valued at $4.9 billion, inclusive of a contingent payment of up to $400 million based on certain post-closing milestones. AMD expects the transaction to be accretive on a non-GAAP basis by the end of 2025.

"Our acquisition of ZT Systems is the next major step in our long-term AI strategy to deliver leadership training and inferencing solutions that can be rapidly deployed at scale across cloud and enterprise customers," said AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. "ZT adds world-class systems design and rack-scale solutions expertise that will significantly strengthen our data center AI systems and customer enablement capabilities. This acquisition also builds on the investments we have made to accelerate our AI hardware and software roadmaps. Combining our high-performance Instinct AI accelerator, EPYC CPU, and networking product portfolios with ZT Systems' industry-leading data center systems expertise will enable AMD to deliver end-to-end data center AI infrastructure at scale with our ecosystem of OEM and ODM partners."

AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) today announced revenue for the second quarter of 2024 of $5.8 billion, gross margin of 49%, operating income of $269 million, net income of $265 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.16. On a non-GAAP(*) basis, gross margin was 53%, operating income was $1.3 billion, net income was $1.1 billion and diluted earnings per share was $0.69.

"We delivered strong revenue and earnings growth in the second quarter driven by record Data Center segment revenue," said AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. "Our AI business continued accelerating and we are well positioned to deliver strong revenue growth in the second half of the year led by demand for Instinct, EPYC and Ryzen processors. The rapid advances in generative AI are driving demand for more compute in every market, creating significant growth opportunities as we deliver leadership AI solutions across our business."

AMD today announced that AMD President Victor Peng is retiring effective August 30, 2024. He will continue to serve on the AMD executive team in an advisory role and support the transition until his retirement date. "Victor re-joined AMD in 2022 following the acquisition of Xilinx and played an important role successfully integrating and scaling our embedded business and leading our cross-company AI strategy," said AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. "Under his leadership, AMD became the industry's #1 provider of FPGA and adaptive computing solutions. On behalf of the AMD Board, executive leadership team and the thousands of employees who have worked with him, I want to thank Victor for his outstanding leadership and wish him the best in his retirement."

Peng retires with over 40 years of experience defining and delivering leadership technologies across FPGAs, SoCs, GPUs and high-performance CPUs. He has served as president at AMD since February 2022 when he rejoined the company after the acquisition of Xilinx, where he spent 14 years, most recently serving as president, CEO and member of the board of directors.

We are live from Computex 2024 in Taipei, where AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su takes center-stage to announce what's next from the world of AMD. The company is expected to announce its new "Zen 5" CPU architecture powering new processors across form-factors. In particular, the company is expected to announce processors for the new AI PC Copilot+ standard announced recently by Microsoft. Several more announcements are expected from the world of datacenters and AI GPU acceleration.01:26 UTC: Setting the tone of things to come is this graphic flashing on the screens. Given the colors, we expect AI announcements both in the enterprise and client segments, but beginning with the enterprise side of it.01:38 UTC: And we're up, with a TAITRA introduction of AMD.

According to a report by KED Global, Korean chipmaking giant Samsung is ramping up its efforts to compete with global giants like TSMC and Intel. The latest partnership on the horizon is AMD's collaboration with Samsung. AMD is planning to utilize Samsung's cutting-edge 3 nm technology for its future chips. More specifically, AMD wants to utilize Samsung's gate-all-around FETs (GAAFETs). During ITF World 2024, AMD CEO Lisa Su noted that the company intends to use 3 nm GAA transistors for its future products. The only company offering GAAFETs on a 3 nm process is Samsung. Hence, this report from KED gains more credibility.

While we don't have any official information, AMD's utilization of a second foundry as a manufacturing partner would be a first for the company in years. This strategic move signifies a shift towards dual-sourcing, aiming to diversify its supply chain and reduce dependency on a single manufacturer, previously TSMC. We still don't know what specific AMD products will use GAAFETs. AMD could use them for CPUs, GPUs, DPUs, FPGAs, and even data center accelerators like Instinct MI series.

AMD on Monday said that its 2024 Computex Keynote address slated for June 3, will see a slew of next-generation product announcements. "Join us as Dr. Lisa Su delivers the Computex 2024 opening keynote and shares the latest on how AMD and our partners are pushing the envelope with our next generation of high-performance PC, data center and AI solutions," the brief release said.

AMD is widely expected to unveil its next-generation Ryzen 9000 "Strix Point" mobile processors for AI PCs capable of powering the recently announced Microsoft Copilot+, its next-generation Ryzen 9000 "Granite Ridge" desktop processors, its 5th Generation EPYC "Turin" server processors, and possibly even its next-generation Radeon RX RDNA 4 generation. At the heart of all its processor announcements is the new "Zen 5" CPU microarchitecture that's expected to introduce an over 10% IPC improvement with significant improvements in AVX512 performance over "Zen 4," which should benefit certain kinds of AI workloads.

AMD earlier this month released documentation for the Micro Engine Scheduler (MES) firmware of its RDNA 3 GPUs. The MES is a hardware component that distributes graphics processing and general-purpose compute workloads among the main number-crunching machinery of the AMD GPU—the shader engines, which contain the compute units (CU), the indivisible SIMD muscle of the GPU with programmable shaders and certain kinds of specialized hardware, such as the AI Accelerator and Ray Accelerator. The MES is driven by a programmable firmware, which is what AMD released developer documentation of.

The decision to release MES documentation probably comes from the very top of AMD corporate management. In March, a controversy erupted when Tiny Corp, builders of AI compute servers and workstations, complained of issues testing the Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card with a ROCm compute stack, prompting a response from no less than CEO Dr Lisa Su. There were then calls to open-source the firmware, which AMD didn't agree to, probably since it treads on their core GPU hardware IP; but the company did the next best thing, by releasing detailed developer documentation for the MES firmware.

The TinyBox AI server system attracted plenty of media attention last week—its creator, George Hotz, decided to build with AMD RDNA 3.0 GPU hardware rather than the expected/traditional choice of CDNA 3.0. Tiny Corp. is a startup firm dealing in neural network frameworks—they currently "write and maintain tinygrad." Hotz & Co. are in the process of assembling rack-mounted 12U TinyBox systems for customers—an individual server houses an AMD EPYC 7532 processor and six XFX Speedster MERC310 Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards. The Tiny Corp. social media account has engaged in numerous NVIDIA vs. AMD AI hardware debates/tirades—Hotz appears to favor the latter, as evidenced in his latest choice of components. ROCm support on Team Red AI Instinct accelerators is fairly mature at this point in time, but a much newer prospect on gaming-oriented graphics cards.

Tiny Corporation's unusual leveraging of Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPUs in a data center configuration has already hit a developmental roadblock. Yesterday, the company's social media account expressed driver-related frustrations in a public forum: "If AMD open sources their firmware, I'll fix their LLVM spilling bug and write a fuzzer for HSA. Otherwise, it's not worth putting tons of effort into fixing bugs on a platform you don't own." Hotz's latest complaint was taken onboard by AMD's top brass—Dr. Lisa Su responded with the following message: "Thanks for the collaboration and feedback. We are all in to get you a good solution. Team is on it." Her software engineers—within a few hours—managed to fling out a set of fixes in Tiny Corporation's direction. Hotz appreciated the quick turnaround, and proceeded to run a model without encountering major stability issues: "AMD sent me an updated set of firmware blobs to try. They are responsive, and there have been big strides in the driver in the last year. It will be good! This training run is almost 5 hours in, hasn't crashed yet." Tiny Corp. drummed up speculation about AMD open sourcing GPU MES firmware—Hotz disclosed that he will be talking (on the phone) to Team Red leadership.

AMD announced that Thomas Zacharia has joined AMD as senior vice president of strategic technology partnerships and public policy. Zacharia will lead the global expansion of AMD public/private relationships with governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and other organizations to help fast-track the deployment of customized AMD-powered AI solutions to meet rapidly growing number of global projects and applications targeting the deployment of AI for the public good.

"Thomas is a distinguished leader with decades of experience successfully creating public/private partnerships that have resulted in consistently deploying the world's most powerful and advanced computing solutions, including the world's fastest supercomputer Frontier," said AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su. "As the former Director of the U.S.'s largest multi-program science and energy research lab, Thomas is uniquely positioned to leverage his extensive experience advancing the frontiers of science and technology to help countries around the world deploy AMD-powered AI solutions for the public good."

AMD today announced that Ava Hahn has joined the company as senior vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary, replacing Harry Wolin who is retiring from AMD after 24 years.

"I want to thank Harry for the role he has played leading our legal, government relations and public affairs teams during a period of significant growth and transformation," said AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. "I am excited to welcome Ava to AMD. Her extensive experience leading legal functions for multiple technology companies will be an invaluable asset as we enter our next phase of growth."

Hahn joins from Lam Research, where she was chief legal officer with responsibility for global legal and governmental affairs. Prior to Lam, she led the legal functions at CA Technologies and Aruba Networks and served as general counsel for multiple technology and VC firms including Kleiner Perkins. She earned a J.D. from Columbia Law School and a B.A. in history from the University of California, Berkeley.

AMD in its post Q3-2023 financial results call stated that it expects the Instinct MI300X accelerator to be the fastest product in AMD history to rake in $1 billion in sales. This would be the time it took for a product in its lifecycle to register $1 billion in sales. With the MI300 series, the company hopes to finally break into the AI-driven HPC accelerator market that's dominated by NVIDIA, and at scale. This growth is attributable to two distinct factors. The first of which is that NVIDIA is supply bottlenecked, and customers and looking for alternatives, and finally found a suitable one with the MI300 series; and the second is that with the MI300 series, AMD has finally ironed out the software ecosystem backing the hardware that looks incredible on paper.

It's also worth noting here, that AMD is rumored to be sacrificing its market presence in the enthusiast-class gaming GPU segment with its next-generation, with the goal of maximizing its foundry allocation for HPC accelerators such as the MI300X. HPC accelerators are a significantly higher margin class of products than gaming GPUs such as the Radeon RX 7900 XTX. The RX 7900 XTX and its refresh under the RX 7950 series, are not expected to have a successor in the RDNA4 generation. "We now expect datacenter GPU revenue to be approximately $400 million in the fourth quarter and exceed $2 billion in 2024 as revenue ramps throughout the year," said Dr. Lisa Su, CEO AMD, at the company's earnings call with analysts and investors. "This growth would make MI300 the fastest product to ramp to $1 billion in sales in AMD history."

TSMC is having a tough time getting its Phoenix, Arizona facility up to fully functional standards—large-scale production at Fab 21 has been delayed into 2025 (as announced back in July). Cited factors include workforce-related issues and sluggish installation of state-of-the-art manufacturing equipment. These setbacks are not too disconcerting in the eyes of leadership at AMD—today CEO Dr. Lisa Su declared that her firm will be one of the first in line to contract with TSMC's Fab 21, thanks to long established bonds: "I think we have gotten extremely good at managing supply chain, so I would say that is one of our core strengths. TSMC has been a phenomenal partner for us in terms of advanced technology, both on the silicon side as well as the packaging side, and we very much value that relationship." Su and NVIDIA chief Jensen Huang were key figures present at the Arizona facility's December 2022 opening ceremony.

AMD's top brass is in attendance at this year's Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference, alongside arch rival Intel. The latter has already dropped their own revelation for the day. Su commented on North American chip manufacturing circumstances: "When you when you think about the geopolitical situation, geographic diversity is important to us...So, the Arizona factory is very important to us. We are going to be one of the early users, we are putting our first tape outs in shortly with the idea of being a significant user of Arizona. I think we will continue to look at the geographic diversity as an important piece of it." AMD has been fabless since 2009, and relies heavily on TSMC's tried and true Taiwan-based plants to produce CPU, GPU, DPU and FPGA products—it will be interesting to observe how things pan out when some of this output gets shifted over to a fledgling facility positioned out there in the Sonoran desert.

AMD's CEO Lisa Su is reported to be visiting a number of companies in Taiwan this week—one of her objectives seems to be getting next generation AM5 desktop platforms prepped with USB4 support. Hardware news site MyDrivers believes that Asmedia played host to Team Red's leader at some point—this is a significant development given that this Taiwanese company specializes in making motherboard chipsets and USB controllers, although Su has allegedly met with other competing firms. Asmedia is reported to be a market leader in terms of implementing the latest USB4 tech, with certification awarded by the USB-IF Association.

Prior leaks have implied that the two companies are already involved with each other on a separate project—their collective goal being Thunderbolt 4 support on next-gen AMD platforms. The timing of this trip to Taiwan suggests that forthcoming AM5 motherboards offering USB4 support could be lined up for launch next year, alongside the "Zen 5" Ryzen 8000 CPU series. Boards based on current gen A620, B650 and X670 chipsets could be refreshed with the latest USB connectivity standard.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative force in chip design, with recent examples from China and the United States showcasing its potential. Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, believes that AI can empower individuals to become programmers, while Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, predicts an era where AI dominates chip design. During the 2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, Su emphasized the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration for the next generation of chip designers. To excel in this field, engineers must possess a holistic understanding of hardware, software, and algorithms, enabling them to create superior chip designs that meet system usage, customer deployment, and application requirements.

The integration of AI into chip design processes has gained momentum, fueled by the AI revolution catalyzed by large language models (LLMs). Both Huang and Mark Papermaster, CTO of AMD, acknowledge the benefits of AI in accelerating computation and facilitating chip design. AMD has already started leveraging AI in semiconductor design, testing, and verification, with plans to expand its use of generative AI in chip design applications. Companies are now actively exploring the fusion of AI technology with Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools to streamline complex tasks and minimize manual intervention in chip design. Despite limited data and accuracy challenges, the "EDA+AI" approach holds great promise. For instance, Synopsys has invested significantly in AI tool research and recently launched Synopsys.ai, the industry's first end-to-end AI-driven EDA solution. This comprehensive solution empowers developers to harness AI at every stage of chip development, from system architecture and design to manufacturing, marking a significant leap forward in AI's integration into chip design workflows.

AMD today announced that Executive Vice President and Chief Sales Officer Darren Grasby will transition into a new role as executive vice president, strategic partnerships and that Phil Guido has joined the company as executive vice president and chief commercial officer. Guido will be responsible for leading the AMD worldwide sales organization with a focus on further accelerating adoption of the company's leadership products with commercial and data center customers.

"I am excited to welcome Phil to our leadership team as we take the next steps in our journey to make AMD the commercial and data center compute partner of choice," said AMD Chair and CEO, Dr. Lisa Su. "Phil brings extensive enterprise and sales experience that will be incredibly valuable as we focus on deepening our enterprise partnerships and accelerating our growth in the data center, embedded and commercial markets. I also want to thank Darren for his transformational leadership as chief sales officer over the last eight years, and I look forward to leveraging his significant industry experience to lead strategic partnerships in his new role."

Barron's Magazine has been on a technology industry kick this week and published their interview with AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su on May 3. The interviewer asks Su about her views on Moore's Law and it becomes apparent that she remains a believer of Gordon Moore's (more than half-century old) prediction - Moore, an Intel co-founder passed away in late March. Su explains that her company's engineers will need to innovate in order to carry on with that legacy: "I would certainly say I don't think Moore's Law is dead. I think Moore's Law has slowed down. We have to do different things to continue to get that performance and that energy efficiency. We've done chiplets - that's been one big step. We've now done 3-D packaging. We think there are a number of other innovations, as well." Expertise in other areas is also key in hitting technological goals: "Software and algorithms are also quite important. I think you need all of these pieces for us to continue this performance trajectory that we've all been on."

When asked about the challenges involved in advancing CPU designs within limitations, Su responds with: "Yes. The transistor costs and the amount of improvement you're getting from density and overall energy reduction is less from each generation. But we're still moving (forward) generation to generation. We're doing plenty of work in 3 nanometer today, and we're looking beyond that to 2 nm as well. But we'll continue to use chiplets and these type of constructions to try to get around some of the Moore's Law challenges." AMD and Intel continue to hold firm with Moore's Law, even though slightly younger upstarts disagree (see NVIDIA). Dr. Lisa Su's latest thoughts stay consistent with her colleague's past statements - AMD CTO Mark Papermaster reckoned that the theory is pertinent for another six to eight years, although it could be a costly endeavor for AMD - the company believes that it cannot double transistor density every 18 to 24 months without incurring extra expenses.

A bunch of unreleased AMD Radeon RX 7000 series graphics card have been spotted in ROCm 5.6 pull request, including the Radeon RX 7950 XTX, 7950 XT, 7800 XT, 7700 XT, 7600 XT, and 7500 XT. AMD has not yet launched its mainstream Radeon RX 7000 graphics cards, but according to the latest pull request, there are several unreleased graphics cards in for both high-end and mainstream segments. While the pull request has been removed from GitHub, it has been saved on Reddit. So far, it appears that AMD's RDNA 3 Radeon 7000 series lineup will be based on just three GPUs, Navi 33, Navi 32, and the Navi 31.

According to the list, we can expect a high-end refresh with Radeon RX 7950 XTX/XT version, also based on Navi 31 GPU. The list also shows that the Radeon RX 7800 series will be the only one based on the Navi 32 GPU, at least for now, while the Navi 33 GPU should cover the entire mainstream lineup, including the Radeon RX 7700 series, Radeon RX 7600 series, and the Radeon RX 7500 series. The list only includes XT versions, while non-XT should show up later, as it was the case with the Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards. AMD's President and CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, already confirmed during Q1 2023 earnings call that mainstream Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs based on RDNA 3 architecture will launch during this quarter, and earlier rumors suggest we might see them at Computex 2023.

AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) today announced revenue for the first quarter of 2023 of $5.4 billion, gross margin of 44%, operating loss of $145 million, net loss of $139 million and diluted loss per share of $0.09. On a non-GAAP basis, gross margin was 50%, operating income was $1.1 billion, net income was $970 million and diluted earnings per share was $0.60.

"We executed very well in the first quarter as we delivered better than expected revenue and earnings in a mixed demand environment," said AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. "We launched multiple leadership products and made significant progress accelerating our AI roadmap and customer engagements in the quarter. Longer-term, we see significant growth opportunities as we successfully deliver our roadmaps, execute our strategic data center and embedded priorities and accelerate adoption of our AI portfolio."

AMD in its Q4-2022 earnings release call disclosed to investors that it "undershipped" chips in the second half of 2022 to keep prices (margins) high and save itself from unsold inventory, in the wake of a steep slump in the PC market. "We undershipped in Q3, we undershipped in Q4," AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su told investors. "We will undership, to a lesser extent, in Q1 [sic]," she added.

Major chipmakers are experiencing an unprecedented slump in demand compared to the spike in demand during the COVID 19 pandemic lockdowns. With high energy prices and the ebb in the pandemic causing much of the white-collar workforce to return to office, there's no longer the kind of demand the PC industry saw in 2021. On the other hand, undersupplies artificially hold prices high, with graphics cards and desktop processors still being unreasonably pricey compared to previous generations. AMD calculated that it would rather make less revenues on fewer chips shipped, than end up with a bloated unsold inventory that it would have to sell at a thin margins, or even at a loss. The company on Tuesday beat expectations to report good Q4-2022 results, which received a thumbs-up from investors.

We are coming to you live from the 2023 International CES! AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su is kicking things off with her Keynote address, where her company is expected to announce its next generation Ryzen 7000 series "Zen 4" mobile processors, a much broader range of Ryzen 7000 desktop processors, including the fabled X3D processors; and much more!02:29 UTC: The show is about to begin with AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su taking centerstage, as CEA inaugurates its 2023 show.02:38 UTC: "Intelligence needs computing power"

TSMC today announced that in addition to TSMC Arizona's first fab, which is scheduled to begin production of N4 process technology in 2024, TSMC has also started the construction of a second fab which is scheduled to begin production of 3 nm process technology in 2026. The overall investment for these two fabs will be approximately US$40 billion, representing the largest foreign direct investment in Arizona history and one of the largest foreign direct investments in the history of the United States.

In addition to the over 10,000 construction workers who helped with construction of the site, TSMC Arizona's two fabs are expected to create an additional 10,000 high-paying high-tech jobs, including 4,500 direct TSMC jobs. When complete, TSMC Arizona's two fabs will manufacture over 600,000 wafers per year, with estimated end-product value of more than US $40 billion.

AMD today is expected to launch its next-generation RDNA3 graphics architecture and next-generation Radeon RX 7000-series graphics cards, along with new gaming technologies as part of the company's "together we advance_gaming" event, unfurled by CEO Dr Lisa Su. In this live-blog we track the various announcements made in the event.20:01 UTC: AMD's roadmap is supremely busy:20:02 UTC: "today it's all about gaming"

AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) today announced selected preliminary financial results for the third quarter of 2022. Third quarter revenue is expected to be approximately $5.6 billion, an increase of 29% year-over-year. AMD previously expected revenue to increase approximately 55% year-over-year at the mid-point of guidance. Preliminary results reflect lower than expected Client segment revenue resulting from reduced processor shipments due to a weaker than expected PC market and significant inventory correction actions across the PC supply chain.

Revenue for the Data Center, Gaming, and Embedded segments each increased significantly year-over-year in-line with the company's expectations. Gross margin is expected to be approximately 42% and non-GAAP(*) gross margin is expected to be approximately 50%. AMD previously expected non-GAAP gross margin to be approximately 54%. The gross margin shortfall to expectations was primarily due to lower revenue driven by lower Client processor unit shipments and average selling price (ASP). In addition, the third quarter results are expected to include approximately $160 million of charges primarily for inventory, pricing, and related reserves in the graphics and client businesses.