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Following a report this afternoon of better-than-expected Q2 revenue and profit, and an upbeat forecast, AMD (AMD) management held a conference call with analysts, following which chief executive Lisa Su was kind enough to talk with me by phone.

AMD shares are now up $1.44, over 10%, at $15.55, in late trading, adding to earlier gains.

"I’m pretty happy,” Said Su, adding "there’s a lot to do, you’re never done.”

"We’ve gotten a lot of positive technology press coverage talking about our products, it’s been a strong first half of the year, we’re making progress in the business results and the financials, with revenue growth and our return to non-GAAP profitability."

“It’s our strategy playing out,” she said, “having a set of very strong products and watching them ramp across a number of quarters."

The company just within the last couple quarters started shipping its “Ryzen” processors for PCs, and is now bringing in first revenue for “Epyc,” its server chip, and its newer graphics processing units (GPU), “Vega.” It has more parts coming later this year, including “Threadripper,” a part for high-end computing, and an integrated CPU and GPU for mobile computing later this year.

I asked Su about the “semi-custom” business, where AMD supplies chips for Microsoft’s (MSFT) “Xbox,” and for Sony’s (SNE) PlayStation console. Su noted during the call that while AMD chips will be in the “Xbox One X” that comes out in November, nevertheless, semi-custom is expected to decline in Q4, after the big ramp up in Q3.

I asked if it’s too soon to talk about next semi-custom projects. She said there is “one additional design that will ramp in the second half of 2018,” and said AMD will wait until the customer is ready to discuss that project. I asked what industry it might be in, and Su replied “let’s just call it embedded."

I asked about Intel’s (INTC) unveiling two weeks ago of its latest server chips, “Xeon Scalable,” meant to continue Intel’s dominance of the data center. Some observers on the Street think AMD will merely succeed in getting Intel to lower prices, only to push AMD aside.

Su argues the “flexibility” of AMD’s technology is something customers want for its own sake:

Our lead story isn’t that our chips are cheaper, although they are. It’s a strong value proposition that we offer that includes technology as well as pricing. We are just giving customers so much flexibility, depending on what type of server they are trying to build. Your combination of CPU and memory and I/O. We are seeing that there is no one-size-fits-all, and the combination of feature sets we are offering is being well received.

I asked Su about how Intel has touted the way Xeon is tailored more this time around for specific workloads in cloud computing.

Su responded that "there is some level of customization for cloud guys, and we will do some of that, but the foundation really is the strength of the portfolio, of the CPU and the I/O."

I also asked Su about the various debates over the merits of AMD’s having gone with an assemblage of multiple silicon die to make Epyc, versus Intel touting the virtues of multiple CPUs on a large single silicon die. “What I would say is we made a very strategic choice with the Epyc architecture,” responded Su. “Going with a multi-chip architecture gives us tremendous flexibility and is a very positive thing for us."

What about comparisons of this or that benchmark between Epyc and Xeon? “In the main benchmarks, we are absolutely in the hunt,” she said. But just as important, said Su, is the value of the product in relation to performance. “We are selling a portfolio of products selling that scales from $500 to over $4,000. At each price point, we offer more performance per dollar, and more I/O per dollar."

"Customers will benchmark based on their specific applications,” she added, "Working in customer labs with their own applications."

Lastly, I asked Su about AMD’s budget. The company has come a long way, some would say, with just a fraction of Intel’s spending. Can they keep it up as they diversify their offerings and scale up volumes of shipments?

“I think it’s a very fair point,” she said, and then went on to say,

We have been very targeted in what we have spent money on. It’s been about, 'Let’s get our CPU and GPU roadmap very strong.' We are — with the strengthening of the business — we are going to spend more on R&D. What’s very exciting now is not just Epyc, but GPU computing, machine learning and A.I. We will look for opportunities to spend more in those areas. From our standpoint, as revenue increases, we will have the ability to spend more in incremental operating expense. We will have an ability to target some of these data center machine learning opportunities.