AMD helmsman Su Zifeng was selected as Time magazine's CEO of the Year, a legendary figure in the industry!

Recently, the famous American magazine "Time" named the best CEO of the year.AMDCEO, Chief Executive OfficerSuzieThe fact that Feng (Lisa Su) received the honor, neither NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang nor Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is currently in the limelight, was a bit of a surprise to everyone, but it makes sense.

Looking back at the development of AMD in the past decade, Su Zifeng can not be called a legend.

The Jewish 'Education Bible', the 'Engineering Gene' in the Bones

At the age of two, Su Zifeng immigrated to the United States with her family. Most of the people who were able to move to the United States in those days were members of the elite. Her father, Dr. Samuel Su, was a doctor at Columbia University's Institute of Mathematical Statistics and later the chief statistician for the New York City government.

Samuel's philosophy of education is heavily based on the Talmud, which recognizes that Jews are not born smart, but rather rely on education and learning to build their future success, and that Jews place a greater emphasis on encouraging independent thinking and active questioning in the education of their children. Samuel Su applied this philosophy to the education of his children, and later, his son became a major trader at Credit Suisse Investments, while his daughter is at the helm of semiconductor giant AMD.

In the United States, Zifeng Su experienced a different human environment. Chunhuai Su recalls that her daughter showed a different interest in STEM subjects at an early age, often taking apart toy cars to explore the inner workings. "Whenever we were all sitting around the dinner table, my father would make us practice our multiplication tables, which pushed me to have to excel in math and kept me curious about how things worked and how they were structured," Su Zifeng says. Her family never limited her interests; she disliked toys like dolls, and her parents were very nurturing of her curiosity, creating an open learning and living environment. The support of her parents combined with her natural curiosity guided her to a career in engineering.

Later, Zifeng entered Bronx High School of Science, known as the "Cradle of Physicists," where her classmates were among the best of their age group. This competitive environment helped her develop the habit of pursuing excellence, not only in her studies but also in her future career. After graduation, she successfully enrolled at MIT and chose to major in electrical engineering because she thought it was the hardest major. Feeling too young, Su Zifeng again followed her parents' advice and pursued a PhD, graduating from MIT with her PhD the year she turned 25.

In an interview with the podcast Behind the Tech, Su Zifeng said, "The value of a PhD is immeasurable. It's not just a degree, it's an opportunity to learn how to think and solve complex problems, and pursuing a PhD means contributing at the highest level in the field of study. Imagine a problem that no one can solve, can you go to a book to find the answer? Obviously it wouldn't work.What we really need to do is look at how we can solve problems and how we can contribute to industry or academia."

Don't work for a Harvard MBA, become an 'absolute leader'

"Never picks on the soft ones."It is Su Zifeng's life credo to face difficulties, and she always inspires people to challenge difficult things in public.In 1995, after leaving Texas Instruments, Su Zifeng joined the former semiconductor giant IBM, responsible for semiconductor research and development business.

After two years at IBM, ZF Su realized his first industry-changing achievement. Copper is one of the best conductive materials for integrated circuits, second only to gold and silver, and costs much less, so to improve chip performance, ZF Su came up with a then-unproven idea:Replacing aluminum in the chip with copper as the interconnect metal.After solving the stability problems faced by copper in the conductive process, copper-for-aluminum became the mainstream in the industry, and until now, the chip industry still uses copper as the interconnecting metal.

In order to improve the performance of the chip, Zifeng Su's team achieved a technological breakthrough in the field of silicon-on-insulator. The team added insulator substances between the silicon transistors, which doubled the parasitic capacitance compared to the original one, thus realizing the increase of the clock frequency, the reduction of leakage, and the saving of photomask materials in the process, which is another industry-changing achievement.

At around the same time, Zifeng Su was given the opportunity to start an internal business at IBM, where she led a team that worked with Sony and Toshiba to design the Cell chip, a multi-core processor for Sony's gaming console, the PlayStation 3. The Cell demonstrated revolutionary performance, with a 1,000-fold increase in performance, which led Zifeng Su to be recognized by outsiders."The Queen of Video Game Technology.", her career rode the east wind.

These accomplishments were later etched forever in IBM's Tablet of Merit. Su worked at IBM for 12 years, one of which she served as assistant to IBM CEO, Mr. Bernard Kuo. Learning to dance with the elephant, Su learned about business and management from him, something she had never been exposed to at MIT or in R&D, which she called"The best MBA education in the world."After working his way up to Vice President of Semiconductor R&D, Su Zifeng left IBM and joined Freescale Semiconductor as Senior Vice President and CTO, where Su Zifeng spent four seasons.

With Su Zifeng these years in the semiconductor industry accumulated ability and performance, Silicon Valley companies have opened the door to her, even if they come out to do it alone, there are a lot of people chasing after her "send money".

At the helm of AMD, ZF Su promotes "Iron Fist Management".

In January 2012, Dr. Zifeng Su, a PhD from MIT, became AMD's Senior Vice President and General Manager. At that time, AMD's stock price was only $3, its share of the data center market was close to zero, and almost no one had any hope for AMD. In the consumer processor market, AMD is still in the Bulldozer architecture (Bulldozer) of the quagmire struggling to extricate themselves, AMD processors have become a "one-core difficulties, seven-core surrounded by" "weak performance, heat" synonymous with the mobile phone market with MediaTek on the cell phone market is called a difficult brother. Intel's huge figure makes AMD's future a moment of gray.

Su Zifeng served after the immediate rectification of AMD's miscellaneous but unrefined business scope, very decisive trade-offs, giving up AMD plans to enter the field of mobile devices, while stopping the development of ARM architecture server processors. These initiatives are very wise, for the strength of the weak AMD, over-ambitious, re-open a market, is undoubtedly the AMD from a quagmire to another quagmire.

Then where is the way out? Su Zifeng made a big bet, she will almost all the chips on the consumer products, emphasizing the need to do a good job of consumer products first. In the game console market, she decisively with Microsoft, Sony cooperation, XBOX ONE, PS4 and now the latest XBOX Series, PS5 are equipped with AMD's CPU and GPU. in the consumer-grade processors, Su Zifeng estimates that it may take three to four years to abandon the old architecture, research and development of new architecture. During this time, AMD's stock price fell, and at its worst was less than $2 per share, but Su used her extraordinary leadership skills to stabilize the situation and prevent the ZEN architecture from being aborted.

In 2017, after four years of painstaking research and development, the AMD RYZEN series of processors came out, which is undoubtedly an epoch-making milestone for the consumer market. The new ZEN architecture has changed the impression of consumers for AMD processors in the past, while the excellent price-performance ratio makes the then-existing Intel scorn three times, began to "squeeze toothpaste", launched more competitive products. Gamers affectionately called Su Zifeng as "Su Ma", "AMD YES" sound endless.

Su Zifeng was not satisfied with the success of the consumer market, immediately returned to the server market, launched the same ZEN architecture server processor EPYC. in the graphics computing field, that is, the GPU market, the opportunity of virtual currency has brought AMD rich income, AMD graphics cards benefit from excellent arithmetic power, a moment to become hot. AMD to take advantage of the wind, the launch of the new RDNA architecture of the new products, although a moment can not shake Nvidia's position as a leader, but with the processor and graphics card both in a quandary compared to Intel, has been outstanding.

Today, the discourse of the artificial intelligence market is still held by Nvidia, Nvidia's general-purpose AI chip makes other enterprises unable to insert, but customized AI chips still have a silver lining, Su Zifeng decisively chose to seize this opportunity.

Under the leadership of Su Zifeng, today's AMD market value has reached 207.3 billion U.S. dollars, while the former dominant Intel is only 87 billion U.S. dollars, AMD undoubtedly played a beautiful turnaround. But compared with the market value of 3.31 trillion dollar giant Nvidia, Su Zifeng's burden is still very heavy.