On stage at the RAISE Summit in Paris, the interviewer put it bluntly to Mark Papermaster. He should have bought AMD shares six months ago, he joked, back when they traded near $200. They now sit above $500. AMD is no longer the plucky underdog chasing Intel on CPUs and Nvidia on GPUs. Its market value is nearing a trillion dollars, up more than 140% in a year.
So what did the market suddenly see? Papermaster’s answer is that AMD laid the groundwork years ago. It shipped its first leadership server CPU in 2017 and has kept an annual cadence since. What changed recently is how AI runs.
Why agents need CPUs, not just GPUs
The popular story of the AI boom is a GPU story. Papermaster wants to widen it. When you run agentic applications, he argues, you lean harder on the CPU, not less. “You’re actually using more and more CPU,” he said. One figure he cited pegs it at roughly four times the CPU work to run what today’s agents do.
The reason is orchestration. A single agent is easy. A real workflow runs many agents at once, spins up sub-agents for specific skills, and juggles a growing pile of context. That coordination and reasoning layer runs on the CPU, before the heavy matrix maths lands on the GPU. Agentic AI, in other words, feeds both.
