48. Mark Papermaster, CTO and EVP at AMD

AMD’s Mark Papermaster, CTO and EVP, talked with me about his background, AMD’s history, and how the company came to position itself as a “bankable supplier” with one of the most diverse semiconductor portfolios for the age of AI: CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, accelerators, custom development, and with rack-scale systems with the pending acquisition of ZT Systems.  A focus on performance and open-ness are AMD’s guiding lights.  Needless to say, we discussed DeepSeek AI, too.  

Note the “skip to” audio time stamps below.  You can read the related article here in 3 minutes.     

Host: Ali Tabibian of GTK Partners.  

On some podcast players you can click to jump to the timestamps below. 

(0:00) Introduction to AMD 

(7:23) Mark’s background and lessons from the iPhone and iPod 

(15:10) The whole banana, or a comprehensive solution suite   

(23:32) DeepSeek AI and the benefit of constraints 

(27:37) Software and an open approach 

(32:30) Balancing investing in innovation and margins