Just to cap off Intel’s annus horribilis, Time picks AMD’s Dr Lisa Su as its CEO of the year

Topping off what has been a mostly positive year of fortunes for AMD, Time magazine has picked Dr Lisa Su as its choice of CEO of the year. While that may come as a surprise to some, it’s a clear reminder that AMD is no struggling underdog but a global force in the chip industry.

Time and Su discussed AMD’s year in a lengthy interview and somewhat naturally, the main focus was on AI and the explosion in demand for massive super-processors. That sector is currently dominated by Nvidia and in the announcement on X, a good number of comments queried why Jen-Hsun Huang of Nvidia wasn’t selected.

Well, Time’s choices in the past haven’t always made a great deal of sense to me (it was OpenAI’s Sam Altman last year, for example) but the way I see it, is that while Nvidia utterly rules the roost in AI chips and discrete gaming GPUs, AMD has a far larger portfolio.

CPUs for desktop PCs, workstations, servers, and laptops; GPUs for all of them, too. All-in-one processors for laptops and handheld gaming PCs, plus custom chips for consoles—a sector that AMD has almost exclusive control over.

AMD also has a healthy slice of the FPGA market and it’s making headway into the supercomputer and AI market. Taking all of this into account, it’s not hard to see why Time picked Su.

While I’m sure Dr Su is very pleased by Time’s vote for her tenure as AMD’s CEO, I’m also sure that she will be decidedly less than pleased by the photograph of her, chosen to furnish Time’s magazine cover. Whether it’s the lighting or just the body position, Su really looks…umm…unusual.

Maybe that’s intentional, to drive the point home that any CEO of any year isn’t a usual person. Anyway, for all my complaints about how AMD does certain things (and oh boy, do I have many), one can’t deny that it’s a genuinely happy end to 2024.

The launch of the Zen 5 CPUs wasn’t great, though the mighty Ryzen 7 9800X3D helped to offset that, and we’re still hoping AMD can step up in the discrete GPU market, but overall, this year has been a successful one for the evergreen chip company.

It’s certainly been a heck of a lot better than Intel’s year, that’s for sure.