No Priors Ep. 53 | With AMD CTO Mark Papermaster

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Thanks there. Glad to be here with you and Elad.

Can you start by telling us a bit about your background? You've worked on all sorts of interesting things from the iPhone and the iPad to, like, the latest generation of AMD SuperComputing chips.

Well, sure. I've been around a while. So what's really fun is my timing was pretty good getting into the industry as an electrical and computer engineering grad, University of Texas, and got really interested in chip design. And so it was back at a time when chip design was radically changing. The kind of technology everyone uses today, CMOS, was just coming into, uh, you know, production usage. And so I got, uh, on s- IBM's very first CMOS projects and created some of the first designs. So I got to get my hands dirty and do just about every facet of, uh, chip design, and had a number of years at IBM and, uh, took on different roles, uh, took on, uh, driving the microprocessor development at, uh, IBM across, uh, first, their, uh, Power, uh, PCs and that wa- you know, meant working with Apple and, uh, Motorola as well as the big iron. The- the big computing chips that we had in the mainframe and the- and the big RISC servers. So, uh, really got all facets o- of technology there and included, uh, working on some of their, uh, server development, but then, uh, shifted over to, um, uh, to Apple, uh, Steve, uh, Jobs hired me to run the iPhone and, uh, iPod, uh, and so I was there for a couple years. But it was, uh, a- a time of a great transition in the opportun- in the, uh, industry and- and for me, it was a great opportunity because I ended up in 2011, fall of 2011, uh, taking the role here at AMD of being both CTO, uh, and- and really running the technology and engineering and right at a point where Moore's Law is starting to slow down and so, eh, you know, tremendous innovation was needed.

Yeah. I wanna get into that and sort of what we can expect in terms of computing innovation if we're not just draming more transistors on chips or we're un- unable to do that. Um, every one of our listeners I think has heard of AMD, but can you give, like, a- a very brief overview of the major markets you serve there?