The Chip Insider®–AI Strategies: AMD, Intel, and Nvidia.

AI Strategies: AMD, Intel, and Nvidia in perspective. AI is not a strategy, it’s a goal. It is a set of useful algorithms that make life easier, while requiring massive amounts of hardware and software to implement. While AI dates back to at least the 60s and beyond, how we know it today is an outgrowth of the PC, out of which came the internet, and from which evolved the datacenter. It is also an outgrowth of Moore’s Law: LSI (Large Scale Integration) made the CPU on a chip possible. Then VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) made the PC possible. Then the PC morphed into internet servers. Then SoC (System on Chip) made the APU possible, which gave cell phones their brain. Out of it also evolved the GPU, which was the mother of the chiplet-based AI chips we see today.

Rewind to between 2010 and 2015 and forget you know how it turned out. Given this history and its PC/Moore’s Law centricity, one would have predicted Intel and AMD would dominate the market today like they did then. Fast forward to 2015, and you might have predicted Apple would come to dominate. It didn’t turn out that way. Instead, an upstart disrupted the AI apple cart: Nvidia. This surprise is the result of luck, situational awareness, grand strategy, and a lack thereof. Nvidia had all three of the first…Move forward to today…and you know the results: Nvidia has a dominant position in the AI market while AMD and Intel are playing catch-up. So, what are the current strategies of AMD, Intel, and Nvidia?…

Maxims: There are two socially competitive strategies Network and Ecosystem. The two grow hand-in-hand… A network advantage follows Metcalfe’s Law, which states that the value of any network is proportional to the… connected users. Apple made the concept of an Ecosystem advantage popular with the 1-2 punch of iTunes and the iPod. Think of ecosystem advantage as an upside-down network advantage. An ecosystem becomes the foundation a network stands on. Instead of users connecting to a single network, an ecosystem’s value is proportional to the square of the number of supply vectors connected both vertically and horizontally…

There are only five business strategies: cost, quality, distribution, technology, and intellectual property (IP). All business strategies break down into these five, or some combination of them. As a general principle, focusing your organization on one is the easiest to execute. The risk of failure grows exponentially as a company combines these strategies, so it’s important to layer them…

"Strategy requires a sense of the whole that reveals the significance of respective parts." – John Lewis Gaddis