Jun 14, 2024 13:10:00

AMD CEO Lisa Su talks about her involvement with the PlayStation series in an interview

AMD CEO Lisa Su spoke to technology analyst Ben Thompson in an interview about the gaming console processors she has worked on throughout her career, including at IBM and AMD.

An Interview with AMD CEO Lisa Su About Solving Hard Problems – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

https://stratechery.com/2024/an-interview-with-amd-ceo-lisa-su-about-solving-hard-problems/

After earning a PhD in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Su began his career at Texas Instruments. He then moved to IBM, where he worked for 12 years as a technical assistant to CEO Louis Gerstner and directed the development of the Cell processor for the PlayStation 3. After serving as chief technology officer at Freescale Semiconductor, he joined AMD in 2012 and has been CEO of AMD since 2014.

The Cell processor installed in the PlayStation 3 was developed by four companies: Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE), Sony, IBM, and Toshiba, with Su representing IBM. The Cell processor focuses on parallelization, and by adopting a heterogeneous multi-core with one general-purpose core and seven simple processor cores, it raised the throughput of the entire chip to an astounding level at the time.

However, the complexity of the architecture made game development and porting more difficult, and the console struggled to compete with Nintendo's inexpensive Wii and the easy-to-use Xbox 360 in the North American market. After developers became familiar with the hardware, games began to appear that boasted high graphic performance that only the PlayStation 3 could provide, but sales did not grow much within the PlayStation series.

During the interview, Thompson asked, 'The Cell processor in the PlayStation 3 was phenomenal, but it ended up being the most unsuccessful piece of hardware in the PlayStation series. What did you learn from that experience?'

The PlayStation 4 and 5 use general-purpose processors made by AMD, and Sue mentioned that he has been involved with the PlayStation series since the PlayStation 3. 'The Cell processor was very ambitious, but it was definitely a success in terms of business,' he said.

Thompson analyzed, 'As screen resolution increased and we moved to

HD , the cost of creating assets increased significantly, and with the advent of game engines it became easier to support a large number of processors, so it became common to support multiple processors when creating games.' He added, 'Developers just wanted to run it on Cell without paying the costs of supporting Cell,' to which Su responded, 'Looking back, ease of programming is likely to have been very important.'

Regarding AMD supplying processors for the PlayStation 4 and 5, Su said, 'We're very proud of the way we've been able to make new leaps in hardware every time.'

The PlayStation 3, Wii, and Xbox 360, which came out in the 2000s, were equipped with PowerPC processors, but the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, which came out in 2013, were equipped with AMD CPUs and GPUs, and AMD products have also been used in subsequent series, proving that Su's policy was correct.

The original interview also talks about the impact of the development of AI and competition with NVIDIA, so be sure to check it out if you're interested.

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