No, AMD CEO Lisa Su Is Not Departing For IBM

Earlier this morning, a seemingly improbable headline started making waves in the tech world. According to the report, Dr. Lisa Su was plotting an exit from her position as CEO of AMD in an effort to take the #2 spot at IBM.

According to the original story, Su’s goal was to eventually ascend to become the CEO and President of IBM, where should would replace current chief Ginni Rometty. Also featured in the report was the assumption that recent AMD hire Rick Bergman – who previously served as CEO of Synaptics – would take over the CEO role following’s Su’s departure according to WCCFTech.

Given how instrumental Su has been in turning around AMD’s fortunes and putting the company on a winning track with the Zen processor microarchitecture, the thoughts of her abandoning ship now just seemed ridiculous to us. Thankfully, Su confirmed our suspicions with a quick and concise response on Twitter.

Just for the record, zero truth to this rumor. I love @amd and the best is yet to come!

— Lisa Su (@LisaSu) August 6, 2019

Su wrote, “Just for the record, zero truth to this rumor.  I love @amd and the best is yet to come!” Hopefully, that puts the thoughts of Su’s departure to rest, as now simply isn’t the time for such a high-profile executive to jump ship.

AMD has been executing at such a feverish pace and with enough consistency that it has even caught Intel off guard. An internal Intel document was leaked to the internet back in late June in which AMD was described as a “resurgent” competitive threat.

Intel exec Steve Collins laid out how challenging it will be to compete with AMD in the near-term, writing:

AMD made improvements in their 2nd generation Zen core and their disaggregated chiplet-based architecture scales cores efficiently. Therefore, on workloads that are heavily threaded, including heavy content creation and most server workloads, they'll get great performance results. And on price, we expect their pricing to be significantly below ours. So they'll likely get good performance-per-dollar. That's what they're going to compete on, and that's the risk to Intel.

So, it looks like Intel won’t be able to breathe a sigh of relief with the impending departure of Dr. Lisa Su. In fact, she’s apparently in it for the long haul and is ready to keep ramping up the pressure on AMD’s long-time rival.