◼ TECHNOLOGY Bloomberg Businessweek August 19, 2019PHOTOGRAPH BY JESSICA CHOU FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK. DATA: COMPILED BY BLOOMBERG
For 50 years now, Intel Corp. has had Advanced
Micro Devices Inc. to kick around. AMD has seen
good eras, but it has remained an afterthought in
the semiconductor business, and less than a decade
ago seemed so adrift that analysts predicted it
would be acquired or simply go out of business.
Today, things are starting to look different.
In its five years under Chief Executive Officer
Lisa Su, AMD has scraped its way back to rele-
vance. It has stabilized and improved finances,
spent the money needed to develop chips that
can outmatch Intel’s, and sold them to major cli-
ents who might have laughed it out of the building
a few years ago. Those heavyweights include the
cloud arms of Amazon.com, Microsoft, and (as of
Aug. 8) Google, the trifecta of cloud computing.
The big cloud providers are especially desperate
for an alternative to Intel’s pricey server chips.
“We’re really excited to have AMD as an option
for our customers,” says Matt Garman, who heads
infrastructure for Amazon’s cloud business. “For
a long time, they weren’t.”
AMD’s value proposition used to begin and end
with price—being a cheaper Brand X. Arguably its
greatest disadvantage was Intel’s ability to steadily
refine its manufacturing production techniques,
improving its chips’ capacity and performance
while lowering their costs. But Intel botched the
rollout of its most advanced technology: proces-
sors made up of transistors just 10 nanometers
thick, 7,500 times thinner than a human hair. Years
of delays have handed AMD a real chance to chal-
lenge Intel in the lucrative server-chips business,Intel’s Foil
Finally
Has a
Free Shot
● Back from the brink, AMD is taking
advantage of its larger rival’s stumblesa market in which a single chip can cost close to ▲ Su
$18,000. AMD said on Aug. 7 tha t it has 7-nanometer
server chips ready to order and that Google is
already using them. Intel has delayed its older
10nm shipments until sometime next year.
“I like to keep my promises,” says Su. Lee Rusk,
an AMD engineering project leader who’s been with
the company for more than three decades, says of
his team’s beating Intel to market with smaller tran-
sistors, “It’s just kind of mind-blowing.”
Intel says it’s been delayed because incorporat-
ing all its best innovations into the chips has taken
longer than expected, and it’s confident its designs
will help maintain its market share. “It’s natural
market behavior to have customers always look
at what their options are,” says Lisa Spelman,