AMD’s patient roadmap has become a highway to success

AMD chief executive Lisa Su ended her keynote speech at the company’s Advancing AI event with a comment marking her tenth year in the hot seat at the chip maker. It was a perfect week to celebrate such a major milestone.

The annual conference saw a raft of exciting new announcements for the firm, including launches for its new MI325X Instinct GPUs, EPYC CPUs, and Ryzen series to help AMD stamp its mark on the burgeoning Copilot+ PC market.

A sense of optimism permeated the keynote session and indeed the whole conference, with Su and fellow executives highlighting the company’s strong position as it moves into a critical period in the year ahead.

“We’re no longer a contender, we view ourselves as a leader,” Dan McNamara, SVP and GM at AMD’s server business unit, told ITPro in a briefing.

All told, AMD appears to be in a very good rhythm right now - and it’s been a long time coming. Under Su’s leadership, the chip maker has clearly been playing the long game: laying critical foundations, building out its ecosystem, acquiring wisely, and biding its time. And it’s beginning to pay dividends.

In 2017, AMD held a zero percent share of the data center market by revenue – today it stands at 34%, underlining the company’s rapid growth in this domain.

A glimpse at this surging potential for AMD came in its recent quarterly earnings call, which saw the company record a 405% increase in operating income in its data center unit compared to the same quarter in the year prior.

With the launch of its new Instinct GPU series, more promise awaits the chip maker. The MI325X - and future iterations roadmapped at the event - could be the ticket to tackling Nvidia’s dominance in the market given it’s more than a match for its current H200 Tensor Core GPU.

AMD told attendees that the MI325X can outperform the H200 by up to 40% in certain AI inference benchmarks, for example.

AMD is ready for major gains in 2025

Andrew Buss, senior research director for EMEA at IDC, tells ITPro that AMD appears to be in a prime position to launch a major push in the market in the year ahead and could gain even more ground on Intel.

“I think AMD has done very well in the last number of years since Lisa took over,” he says. “As we saw, they’ve gone from zero percent data center share - particularly for server CPUs, up to around a third of the value of the x86 server market. So they’re very potent compared to Intel.

“If you actually look at the progress of something like an ARM-based server, AMD has actually done far better,” Buss adds. “I think that shows that if you've got the right product with a performance advantage, a cost advantage, or efficiency advantage and you can deliver on your roadmaps and your product promises, you can be accepted.”

AMD did “a lot of the hard work around 2018 to 2020,” Buss notes, pointing to its ability to continually improve upon product releases across its main target areas as further proof of its sharpened focus.

“I think now we're seeing them expanding,” Buss says. “They’ve made some good acquisitions. They’ve always had the graphics division but maybe they hadn’t focused on AI as much as Nvidia had.

“Nvidia caught the generative AI wave, and AMD’s recognized that. Now with the Instinct series, the latest generation, the 300 series, is much more tuned to that.”

It must be frustrating for Nvidia’s competitors. In recent years, the firm’s meteoric rise has captured the attention of the media and tech industry stakeholders alike, with the generative AI race surging it to record profits and a formidable market cap.

While there are no concrete signs that the company will be knocked off its perch any time soon, this attention has enabled competitors such as AMD to innovate somewhat out of the limelight. This breathing space might be the best thing AMD could’ve hoped for.

Moving forward, the chip maker can frame itself as the best viable alternative to Nvidia. While exact details on pricing were left unmentioned, much of the messaging around its new generation chips pointed toward them being a more cost-effective option than Nvidia’s pricey hardware.

Moving forward, the chip maker can frame itself as the best viable alternative to Nvidia. While exact details on pricing were left unmentioned, much of the messaging around its new generation chips pointed toward them being a more cost-effective option than Nvidia’s pricey hardware.