Networking giant Cisco, has announced the appointment of AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su to its Board of Directors.
Su, like many other executives, has served on boards at other companies before and the move comes after she stepped down from the Board at Analog Devices in December 2019.
Su will stay in her position as AMD CEO and on AMD’s own Board of Directors.
“Lisa is an accomplished business leader with deep expertise in the semiconductor industry,” said Chuck Robbins, chairman and CEO, Cisco. “We look forward to her contributions to Cisco’s board and our business as we continue to develop ground breaking technologies, and a new Internet for the 5G era that will help our customers innovate faster than ever before.”
Su, 50, joined AMD in 2012 and has held the position of president and chief executive officer since October 2014. She also serves on AMD’s Board of Directors. Previously, Su served as senior vice president and general manager, Networking and Multimedia at Freescale Semiconductor, Inc., and was responsible for global strategy, marketing and engineering for the company’s embedded communications and applications processor business.
In addition, she spent the previous 13 years at IBM in various engineering and business leadership positions, including vice president of the Semiconductor Research and Development Centre responsible for the strategic direction of IBM’s silicon technologies, joint development alliances and semiconductor R&D operations. Prior to IBM, she was a member of the technical staff at Texas Instruments Incorporated from 1994 to 1995.
The announcement comes on the eve of AMD’s financial earnings, but Cisco’s press statement is light on details and doesn’t include any information about Su’s compensation package.
Cisco, a networking hardware, software, and telecommunications giant, currently has a market cap of $201.38bn. For comparison, AMD currently has a market cap of $54.68bn.
Notably, Cisco is a key competitor for Mellanox, which is currently in the midst of a $6.9bn acquisition by Nvidia. That acquisition is still working its way through regulatory channels and awaits approval from China’s MOFCOM organisation, which might be a dicey proposition given the ongoing trade war. In either case, Su and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang might find themselves on opposite sides of the ball once again, but this time in the networking market.
Cisco is deeply involved in the networking field, but also has a line of Unified Computing System (UCS) servers that predominantly feature Intel’s silicon, although a few models already come equipped with AMD’s EPYC processors.
Su has a Bachelor of Science, Master of Science and Doctorate degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
