"When I took over AMD, the company was a month from running out of cash. Everyone said we were done. But the problem was not the engineers — it was the strategy. We needed to stop competing on volume and start competing on coordination: heterogeneous chiplets, interconnects, the architecture of how pieces communicate with each other. The silicon is easy. The coordination layer is what wins."
Electrical engineer who became one of the most consequential CEOs in semiconductor history by turning AMD from near-bankruptcy into a $200B+ company. Her insight was architectural: instead of competing chip-for-chip, she pioneered chiplet design — modular silicon tiles that communicate through high-bandwidth interconnects. The MI300X AI accelerator places CPU and GPU chiplets in the same package, creating a physical coordination layer between compute types that dramatically reduces memory bottlenecks in AI workloads.