Jim Keller saved AMD and chances are his company Tenstorrent will end up being a big dog in AI. AMD should buy his startup in an all-stock deal given the lofty AMD valuation. Bring the maestro back, win the AI generation of chips.
Hardware-oriented companies often struggle to build good software stacks for the simple reason that they don't know what's good or bad in software, so they don't know who to hire.
In the worst case, you get a model where the software guys aren't worth paying well because their stuff is easy, and somehow their stuff is always late and broken anyway so they can't be worth much.
Then noone can sell the hardware because it's worthless without the code and the company fails and it's all the fault of the software engineers who couldn't do the easy thing that, uh, the hardware guys also couldn't do.
If Tenstorrent 'wins', while Intel is able to catch and beat AMD, I think that would prove the strongest case for Keller.
If AMD keeps staying as far ahead and they have been, it makes a strong case for Su.
The truth is likely a combination of the two.