Slashdot Mirror
AMD CEO Dirk Meyer Resigns
angry tapir writes "Advanced Micro Devices has announced that Dirk Meyer has resigned from the post of CEO, and that the company is beginning to search for a new chief executive. Meyer resigned in a mutual agreement with the board of directors, and the company has appointed Thomas Seifert, the company's chief financial officer, as the interim CEO. Meyer was installed as CEO in 2008 as a replacement to Hector Ruiz, just as the company was making its way out of rough financial times. In October, AMD posted a third-quarter net loss of US$118 million."
I'll agree with this. AMD's been seeing some triumphs lately- their graphics division has been very successful, even despite a minor delay with the Radeon HD6900 GPU. Nvidia might have the performance crown this generation, but their previous generation has been shaky and their 40nm chips haven't been as available as AMD's, allowing AMD to gain considerable marketshare.
I've noticed a few netbooks with AMD Bobcat cores appear at CES, and has enough performance and power efficiency to give both Atom and Ion some serious competition.
While Llano doesn't appeal to me personally, it's nice to see Fusion reaching the desktop shortly. I'm also anxious to see how the Bulldozer will perform once it's released in a few months.
With the delay of Intel's Ivy Bridge into 2012, AMD has a lot of potential to make this year a profitable one.
Sigs are for losers
Just to add to this..
..the predecessor to DirectCompute was a little .NET library that came out of Microsoft Research called Accelerator which was initially available to the public in 2006.
..thats several years before CUDA (2008) and OpenCL (also 2008)
Microsoft has actually been the innovator on this one.
"His name was James Damore."
AMD has been the clear leader for consumer choice and value since the K6/3, which is a complete monster. Actually, the K6/2 is a beast as well, but it has a crap fpu still. Not that I expect anyone to do this today, but if you actually compile your full system for K6 (hello, Gentoo!) then you will beat the pants off a Pentium II of the same clock rate and cache... not to mention that a K6/3 system with external cache has an L3 cache because of the integrated L2. Unfortunately they were saving their pennies for the upcoming K7 launch so they didn't have the money to do a fully rebranded K6/3 launch as a new product which could actually compete with the P2 in the x86 market.
New intel processors are always astoundingly expensive until the next AMD processor comes out, so IMO it is safe to say that you should always wait for AMD to bring out a processor before a new purchase even if you don't plan to buy AMD. And if more people did that, Intel would drop their pricing and a new equilibrium would be found, but a lot of people who didn't understand (or won't forgive) the K6 FPU debacle will never forgive AMD for their one (very real) failure. If you look back at AMD's list of attempts to rival or even surpass intel they are all massive successes, including 40 MHz 386s, low-power 486s, the oddly competitive yet overlooked 586...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Considering their market cap, and Oracle's interest in chip companies, It wouldn't surprise me if Larry Ellison isn't their next CEO.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
As someone who was able to compare salaries when AMD bought ATI, I've got to take issue with that comment... AMD actually paid *very* handsomely compared to ATI (and that pay disparity still exists, and causes some resentment... but that's a separate issue). And of course, there are tons of highly competent, skilled, and creative engineers still in the company.
A lot of "top" ex-ATI talent has gone elsewhere (also starts with 'A'), but that phenomenon is almost exclusively limited to Silicon Valley. In general, the hop from job-to-job culture is far less practical when there are only a handful of ASIC jobs to be had in certain areas. Many "top" CPU guys are still around too, so far as I can tell (not my department).
The thing that I notice from all of these moves is that ex-ATI people are on the move upwards, largely displacing the CPU side. The poor execution of the latter group is a large part of that, no question. The trouble is, most of the moves upwards are being made by people in (you guessed it), Silicon Valley. The headquarters is still in Austin, but it's becoming little San Fransisco. The reason this is a problem? Well, it's building resentment in almost the entire remainder of the company, which is a rather large organization. The CPU guys are annoyed that everything is moving under formerly-graphics ownership (add that to the irritated sentiment that AMD overpaid for ATI...), and two-thirds of the GPU guys are annoyed that everything is moving under Silicon Valley ownership. Some changes are viewed as being unfair (such is life) and some are clearly undeserved (ATI had some big screw-ups too). The politics is actually pretty bad; it's much worse than any other place I've ever worked.
We've got a group meeting about this announcement this afternoon. I wonder what the spin will be...
captcha: tantrum
haha...