 Good morning, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's day two coverage of VMware Explorer 2022 live from San Francisco. Lisa Martin here with Dave Nicholson. We're excited to kick off day two of great conversations with VMware partners, customers, its ecosystem. We've got an alumni back with us, whom are on SEVA corporate VP of business development from AMD joins us. Great to have you on the program in person. Great to be here, yes, in person indeed, welcome. So, the great thing yesterday, a lot of announcements. AMD had an announcement with VMware, which will unpack that, but there's about 7,000 to 10,000 people here. People are excited, ready to be back, ready to be hearing from this community, which is so nice. Yesterday, AMD announced it is optimizing AMD Pensando distributed services card to run on VMware vSphere 8. vSphere 8 was announced yesterday. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, no, absolutely. The Pensando SmartNIC DPU, what it allows you to do is it provides a whole bunch of capabilities, including offloads, including encryption, decryption. It can even do functions like compression, but with the combination of VMware Project Monterey and Pensando, what we're able to do is even do some of the vSphere actual offloads, integration of the hypervisor into the DPU card. It's pretty interesting and pretty powerful technology. We're pretty excited about it. I think this could potentially bring some of the cloud value in terms of manageability, in terms of being able to take care of bare metal servers and also better secure infrastructure. Cloud-like techniques into the mainstream on-premises enterprise. Okay, talk a little bit about the DPU data processing unit. They talked about it on stage yesterday, but help me understand that versus the CPU, GPU. Yeah, so it's a different point, right? So normally you'd have the CPU, you'd have what we call a dumb networking card, right? And then say dumb, but it's just designed to go process packets and put them onto PCI and have the CPU do all of the kind of the packet processing, the virtual switching, all of those functions inside the CPU. What the DPU allows you to do is actually offload a bunch of those functions directly onto the DPU card. So it has a combination of these special purpose processors that are programmable with a language called P4, which is one of the key things that Pensando brings you. So it's a real easy to program, easy to use kind of set so that some of our larger enterprise customers can actually go in and do some custom coding depending on what their network infrastructure looks like. But you can do things like the V-switch in the DPU, not having to all have that done on the CPU. So you freeze up some of the CPU cores, makes your infrastructure run more efficiently. But probably even more importantly, it provides you with greater security, greater separation between the networking side and the CPU side. So that's a key point because a lot of us remember the era of the Tonic TCP IP offload engine, Nick, this isn't simply offloading CPU cycles. This is actually providing a sort of isolation so that the network is, the network has intelligence that is separate from the server. Is that effective? That's absolutely key. That's absolutely key. Yeah, that's a good way of looking at it. Yeah, and that's, I mean, if you look at some of the techniques used in the cloud, this fact brings some of those technologies into the enterprise, right? So where you are wanting to have that level of separation and management, you're able to now utilize the DPU card. So that's a really big part of the value proposition, the manageability, not just offload, but kind of a better network for enterprise. Can you expand on that value proposition? If I'm a customer, what's in this for me? How does this help power my multi-cloud organization? Yeah, so I think we have some, we actually have a number of these in real customer use cases today. And so, you know, folks will use, for example, the compression and the, sorry, the compression and decompression. That's definitely an application in the storage side, but also on the, just as a DPU card in the mainstream general purpose, general purpose server infrastructure fleet, they're able to use the encryption and decryption to make sure that their infrastructure is kind of safe from point to point within the network. So every connection there is actually encrypted. And that managing those policies and orchestrating all of that, that's done to the DPU card. So what you're saying is if you have DPUs involved, then the server itself and the CPUs become completely irrelevant. And basically it's just a box of sheet metal at that point. That's my segue to talking about the value per opposition of the actual AMD. No, absolutely, no, no. I think the CPUs are always going to be central in this. And look, so I think having the DPU is extremely powerful and it does allow you to have better infrastructure, but the key to having better infrastructure is to have the best CPU. Tell us about that. So this is where a lot of the great value proposition between VMware and AMD come together. So VMware really allows enterprises to take advantage of these high core count, really modern CPU, our epic, especially our Milan, our 7003 product line. So to be able to take advantage of 64 cores, VMware is critical for that. And so what they've been able to do is for example, if you have workloads running on legacy, like five year old servers, you're able to take a whole bunch of those servers and consolidate them down into a single node. And the power that VMware gives you is the manageability, the reliability, brings all of that factors and allows you to take advantage of the latest generation CPUs. We've actually done some TCO modeling where we can show, even if you have fully depreciated hardware, like so it's like five years old plus. And so the actual cost, it's all even written off. But the cost, just the cost of running it in terms of the power and the administration, the Apex costs that are associated with it are greater than the cost of acquiring a new set of, a smaller set of AMD servers. And being able to consolidate those workloads, run VMware to provide you with that great, great user experience, especially with vSphere 8.0 and the hooks that VMware have built in for AMD processors, you actually see really, really good. It's a great user experience. It's also a more efficient, just better for the planet. And it's also better on the pocketbook, which is a really cool thing these days because our value in TCO translates directly into a value in terms of sustainability, right? And so from energy consumption, from just the cost of having that there, it's just a whole lot better. Talk about on the sustainability front, how AMD is helping its customers achieve their sustainability goals. And are you seeing more and more customers coming to you saying, we want to understand what AMD is doing for sustainability because it's important for us to work with vendors who have a core focus on it? Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think, I'll be perfectly honest, when we first designed our CPU, we're just trying to build the biggest, baddest thing that comes out in terms of having the largest number of cores and the best TCO for our customers. But what it's actually turned out, that TCO involves energy consumption and it involves, you know, the whole process of bringing down a whole bunch of servers. For example, we have one calculation where we show 27, you know, like I think like five year old servers can be consolidated down into five AMD servers. That ratio, you can see already, you know, huge gains in terms of sustainability. Now you asked about the sustainability conversation, I'd say not a week goes by where I'm not having a conversation with a CTO or CIO who's got that as part of their corporate brand and they want to find out how to make their infrastructure, their data center more green, right? And so that's where we come in. Yeah, and it's interesting because at least in the US, money is also green. So when you talk about the cost of power, especially in places like California. That's right. There's a natural incentive to drive in that direction. Let's talk about security. You know, the threat landscape has changed so dramatically in the last couple of years. Ransomware is a household word. Ransomware attacks happen like one every 11 seconds. Older technology, a little bit more vulnerable to internal threats, external threats. How is AMD helping customers address the security fund, which is the board level conversation? That's a great question. Look, I look at security as being, it's a layered thing, right? I mean, you talk to any security experts, security doesn't, there's not one component and we are an ingredient within the greater scheme of things, a few things. One is we have partnered very closely with VMware. They have enabled our SEV technology, secure encrypted virtualization technology into vSphere. So such that all of the memory transactions, so you have security when you store on disks, you have security over the network and you also have security in the compute and when you go out to memory, that's what this SEV technology gives you. It gives you that security in your actual virtual machine as it's running. And so we take security extremely seriously. I mean, one of the things, every generation that you see from AMD and you have seen us hit our cadence, we do upgrade all of the security features and we address all of the sort of known threats that are out there and obviously there's threats kind of coming at us all the time, but our CPUs just get better and better from a security stance. So shifting gears for a minute. Obviously we know the pending possible acquisition, the announced acquisition of VMware by Broadcom. AMD's got a relationship with Broadcom independently, right? No, of course. How's that relationship? Oh, it's a great relationship. I mean, they have certified their NIC products, their HPA products, which are utilized for storage systems, sand systems, those type of architectures, the hardcore storage architectures. We work with them very closely. So they've been a great partner with us for years. And you've got, I know we're talking about current generation available on the shelf, Milan-based architecture, is that right? That's right, yeah. But if I understand correctly, maybe sometime this year, you're gonna be rolling out the new stuff? Yeah, absolutely. So later this year, we've already talked about this publicly. We have a 96 core Genoa platform, up to 96 cores, Genoa platform. So we're just taking that TCO value just to the next level, increasing performance, DDR5, CXL with memory expansion capability, very, very neat, leading edge technology. So that's gonna be available. Is that next gen PCIe or has that shift already been made? It's next gen PCIe, PCIe Gen5. So we'll have that capability. That'll be out by the end of this year. Okay, so those components you talk about, you talk about the Broadcom VMware universe, those components that are going into those new slots are also factors in performance. Yeah, absolutely. You need to balance, right? You need to have networking storage and the CPU. We're very cognizant of how to make sure that these cores are fed appropriately. Okay, because if you just put out a lot of cores, you don't have enough memory, you don't have enough IOs. That's the key to our approach to enabling performance in enterprise. Make sure that the systems are balanced. So the experience that you've had with, let's say you're a 12 core, you're 16 core, you can have that same experience in the 96 core, 96 core socket. So maybe a 192 core is total, right? So you can have that same experience in a two node, in a much denser package server today or using Milan technology, 128 cores, super, super good performance, super good experience. It's designed to scale, right? And especially with VMware, as our infrastructure, it works great. I mean, Lisa's got a question to ask. I know, but bear with me. Bear with me? Yes, sir. We've actually initiated coverage of this question of, does hardware matter anymore? Does it matter anymore? So I put to you the question. Do you think hardware still matters? Oh, I think it's going to matter even more and more going forward. I mean, just in this conversation today, right? Who cares, it's all cloud. Yeah, so definitely their workload's moving to the cloud and we love our cloud partners. Don't get me wrong, right? But there are, I've had so many conversations at this show this week about customers who cannot move to the cloud because of regulatory reasons. Yeah. The other thing that you don't realize too, and it's new to me is that people have depreciated their data centers. So the cost for them to just go put in new AMD servers is actually very low compared to the cost of having to go buy a public cloud service. They still want to go buy public cloud services. And that, by the way, we have great, great, great AMD instances on AWS, on Google, on Azure, Oracle, like all of our major, all of the major cloud providers support AMD and have great TCO instances that they've put out there with good performance. Yeah. What are some of the key use cases that customers are coming to AMD for? And what have you seen change in the last couple of years with respect to every customer needing to become a data company, needing to really be data-driven? No, that's also great questions. So I used to get this question a lot. She only asks great questions. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I asked this. I go down in the hall, around in the weeds and get excited about the bits and the bytes. She asked that. But I think, look, I think the, you know, a few years ago and I think I used to get this question all the time. What workloads run best on AMD? My answer today is unequivocally all the workloads, okay? Because we have processors that run, you know, run at the highest performance per thread, per core, that you can get. And then we have processors that have the highest throughput and sometimes are one in the same, right? And Milan64 would configure the right way using VMware vSphere. You can actually get extremely good per-core performance and extremely good throughput performance. It works well across, just as you said, like the database, the data management, all of those kinds of capabilities, DevOps, you know, ERP. Like there's just been a whole slew, slew of applications use cases. We have design wins in major customers in every single industry in every, and these are big, you know, the big guys, right? And they're using AMD. They're successfully moving over their workloads without issue for the most part. In some cases, customers tell us they just move the workload on, turn it on. It runs great, right? And they're fully happy with it. You know, there are other cases where we've actually gotten involved and we figured out, you know, there's this configuration and that configuration, but it's typically not a huge lift to move to AMD. And that, I think, is a key point. And we're working together with almost all of the major ISV partners, right? And so just to make sure that they have run tested, certified, I think there are over 250 world record benchmarks, you know, running in all sorts of, you know, like Oracle, Database, SAP, Business Suite. All of those types of applications run extremely well on AMD. Is there a particular customer story that you think really articulates the value of running on AMD in terms of enabling big business outcomes, say, for a financial services organization or healthcare organization? Yeah, I mean, yeah, there's certainly been, I mean, across the board. So in healthcare, we've seen customers actually do the server consolidation very effectively and then, you know, take advantage of the lower cost of operation because in some cases, they're trying to run servers on each floor of a hospital, for example. We've had use cases where customers have been able to do that because of the density that we provide and to be able to actually take their compute more even to the edge than actually have it in those use cases in a centralized manner. Another interesting case is FSI and financial services. We have customers that use this for general purpose IT. We have customers that use this for kind of the high performance, we call it grid computing. So, you know, you have guys that do all this trading during the day, they collect tons and tons of data and then they use our computers or our CPUs to just crunch through that data overnight. And it's just like this big supercomputer that just crunches, it's pretty incredible. There, the density of the CPUs, the value that we bring really shines. But in their general purpose fleet as well, right? So they're able to use VM where a lot of VM were customers in that space. We love our VM were customers and they're able to utilize this. They use this with HCI, so hyperconverged infrastructure with V-SAN. And that works extremely well and our enterprise customers are extremely happy with that. Talk about, as we wrap things up here, what's next for AMD, especially AMD with VMware as VMware undergoes its potential change. Yeah, so there's a lot that we have going on. I mean, I got to say, VMware is one of the, you know, let's say premier companies in terms of being innovative and being able to drive new interesting pieces of technology and they're very experimental, right? So we have a ton of things going with them, but certainly, you know, driving Pensando is very, it's very, very important to us. Yeah, I think that the whole, we're just in the cusp, I believe, of server consolidation becoming a big thing for us. So driving that together with VMware and into some of these enterprises where we can show, you know, save the Earth while we, you know, in terms of reducing power, reducing and saving money in terms of TCO, but also being able to enable new capabilities. You know, the other part of it too is this new infrastructure enables new workloads. So things like machine learning, you know, more data analytics, more sophisticated processing, you know, that is all enabled by this new infrastructure. So we were excited. We think there were other precipice of, you know, going, a lot of industries moving forward to having, you know, the next level of IT. It's no longer about just payroll or enterprise business management. It's about, you know, how do you make your, you know, your knowledge workers more productive, right? And how do you give them more capabilities? And that is really what's exciting for us. Awesome, Kuberin. Thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program today, talking about what AMD, what you're doing to supercharge customers, your partnership with VMware and what is exciting what's on the forefront, the frontier. We appreciate your time and your insights. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you. Thank you for our guests and Dave Nicholson. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from VMware Explorer 22 from San Francisco, but don't go anywhere. Dave and I will be right back with our next guest.