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."

Comments

AMD CPUs all over the place

[e4g4]

With AMD CPUs left and right, how is AMD posting a loss?

Re:AMD CPUs all over the place

[hedwards]

I haven't looked at the financial sheets, but I would venture to guess that a lot of it is R&D trying to catch up with Intel again.

Re:AMD CPUs all over the place

[RightSaidFred99]

They're in a price war with a competitor who is a generation ahead of them in manufacturing technology. Their margins are getting slimmer and slimmer.

Re:AMD CPUs all over the place

[Khyber]

Ahead in manufacturing tech, maybe. Architecture? Who made x64? Who has one of the lowest power draw/highest performance CPU/GPU combo for mobile systems that would shit all over tons of current in-service desktop systems, with an even better revision coming soon?

When it comes down to it, none of the hardware companies are really that impressive. The hardware right now is enough to do WAY BETTER performance-wise, the problem is that programs are becoming so bloated and unoptimized.

It's coming down to where even programs you pay for are wasting resources by beaming ads to you.

Welcome to the future.

Re:AMD CPUs all over the place

[Kjella]

What does volume matter if you don't have margins?

1. Intel has always been ahead on processing tech, often a generation in front or if not on a more mature process. That means AMD has bigger dies and lower yields, which directly inflate cost.
2. A lot of the expense is R&D, and with Intel having ~80% of the microprocessor market each AMD chip has to carry at least four times as much of the cost as each Intel chip.
3. Intel got a processor to match every one of AMDs, the reverse is not true. Intel makes high margins where they are alone and squeezes AMDs margin where they compete.

Seriously, take a look at something like 3D rendering performance, which is usually extremely multi-threading friendly. The 2500K which sells for less than the 1100T is beating it in everything but the POV-ray test. Never mind that it's much faster and better for everything that doesn't take advantage of six cores. The Opteron vs Xeon battle looks the same, AMD had the advantage a while but they're struggling badly now there too. On the low end Intel has the Atom which is raking in money meaning AMD is losing a lot of low-end sales. They're boxed in and in every market they deliver "value" processors. That means in other words low income processors. So with low income and high costs, you post a loss.

Re:AMD CPUs all over the place

[robthebloke]

Ahead in manufacturing tech, maybe. Architecture? Who made x64?

That's a bit like saying ford is the worlds greatest motor company because of the Model T, and then neglecting to notice the failures of it's recent business practices. x64 was something AMD did right 8 years ago. In the last 8 years however, things haven't gone as well for the business....

Who has one of the lowest power draw/highest performance CPU/GPU combo for mobile systems that would shit all over tons of current in-service desktop systems, with an even better revision coming soon?

Intel ATOM and Nvidia ION?

Musical chairs

[syousef]

Hey, that's one clever way to get your mind off the recession: Play musical chairs with the company execs. Did you see the job open up at Microsoft? Time to apply Dirk! Where she stops nobody knows....weeeehheeeeee! You poor schleps can lose your jobs, we'll just keep going round and round!

Re:Musical chairs

[hedwards]

Actually, that's typically how it's handled when the CEO makes an abrupt departure, one of the other executive board members will step in while they find a replacement.

Personally, I don't blame him, I blame it on Intel and its successful attempts to bribe major equipment integrators to not use AMD chips.

Re:Musical chairs

[Rockoon]

No amount of bribes in the world can account for the fact that Intel's latest processors have been significantly outperforming AMD's for the last few years now.

Yet AMDs significantly outperformed Intels for quite a few years.. but only managed 50% market share at its height because of Intels illegal (no "questionable" about it) practices.

Re:Sorry..

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one an sorry to see him go. I think he has brought the company well through some rough times.

Some CEO's that are great for riding through the rough times aren't the CEO's that you want when that stretch is over.

Any word yet

[publiclurker]

on how many million they will be rewarding him for losing that $118 million?

Re:Sorry..

[1984]

Winston Churchill, meet Clement Atlee.

Except I think that involved winning a war, not just surviving in a currently tenuous second position...

Re:Sorry..

[Cornelius the Great]

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.

Hard call for GPU selection

[DoofusOfDeath]

I'm just getting going on GPU programming. I was thinking to go with OpenCL (pushed by AMD/ATI ) over CUDA (pushed by nVidia) because I thought AMD looked more likely to survive in the long term. But now it's getting harder to tell which company is safer to rely upon.

Re:Hard call for GPU selection

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm just getting going on GPU programming. I was thinking to go with OpenCL (pushed by AMD/ATI ) over CUDA (pushed by nVidia) because I thought AMD looked more likely to survive in the long term. But now it's getting harder to tell which company is safer to rely upon.

OpenCL works on both AMD and nVidia GPUs , so you should be safe there.

Re:Hard call for GPU selection

[DeadBugs]

Actually NVIDIA was a major contributor to OpenCL http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT120710035639

Re:Hard call for GPU selection

[Cornelius the Great]

Intel has also promised OpenCL support on Sandy Bridge and later integrated GPUs. Not to mention S3 and VIA support.

I predict that Cuda will quickly become irrelevant and die a long, slow death (ie- just legacy support, no new features). Much like Cg did, after GLSL and HLSL matured. No one wants to be stuck on a single hardware platform, despite performance advantages.

Re:After intel's sandy bridge launch...

[exomondo]

I would resign too, AMD is always the bridesmaid never the bride.

Their best run was with the Athlon64 vs Netburst, but even though they had the superior product they didn't have the OEM deals.

Mobile Failure

[DeadBugs]

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2011/1/10/coup-at-amd-dirk-meyer-pushed-out.aspx It seems that that the selling off of their mobile business and the success of Tegra is behind this.

Re:Sorry..

[Cornelius the Great]

I hate to break it you, but Fusion, Bobcat, and Bulldozer have been in development for quite a long time- all of these projects started when Hector was at the helm. Dirk can hardly be credited with these product releases, other than keeping AMD afloat long enough to allow these products see the light of day.

Re:Sorry..

[Rockoon]

so the guy that brought AMD to a position where they're successfully launching 3 products in one year (which they've never done before) is not someone you want to keep around? Are you kidding?

Are you honestly asking this question? If you are going to pretend to know anything about the business world, then you should at least pretend to also know that some CEO's are specialists at bringing companies out of financial trouble and even bankruptcy.

For example (from my industry) there is Scott Butera, a CEO that has brought more than one casino out of financial trouble, who has just been picked up by the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut because of its very serious financial troubles (billions in debt, defaulting on loans..)

Often what these specialists bring to the table is their trusted contacts in the financial industries. The primary goal is often to maintain a credit line while the problems are resolved (because no large business can run without credit, regardless of how much cash they have.)

Re:I'm no silicon engineer...

[Trogre]

You forgot Opteron. Where else can I get twelve physical cores per CPU? Not Intel, that's for sure.

Still an AMD fanboy

[madwheel]

It's unfortunate, but regardless, I will be a die hard AMD supporter. They've helped keep the market competitive, have much better business practices, and always have the end-user in mind with regards to their CPU socket configurations. Or should I say configuration? One socket for a massive range of CPUs. I like being in control of my upgrades. I can't stand that Intel changes MB socket types with damn near every CPU and expect it to be alright to fork over a couple hundred bucks in addition to the CPU price. AMD has never let me down since I switched during the K7 era. I for one can not wait for the Bulldozer. I know right now the new Sandy Bridge chip is simply amazing but I can wait a few months.

Re:Still an AMD fanboy

[drinkypoo]

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...

Re:Unification under DirectX

[Rockoon]

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.

Re:I'm no silicon engineer...

[Rockoon]

You're forgetting that AMD has a very comfortable performance lead at the very high end

Yes, those are AMD 48-core system at #1... and #2... and #3

Then there is the old performance per dollar metric where AMD has the top 7 chips on the market right now.

Intel definitely has some good chips, but aside from a small group of them, they are terrible value (rip off) and also not something they are selling a whole lot of (if you are throwing down $1000 for the CPU, you are probably in the market for a server chip with significantly better memory bandwidth than that i7-980 offers)

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Amd paid thier best engineers poorly

[assemblerex]

they all left, party over. Long story made short.

Re:Amd paid thier best engineers poorly

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Dirk Meyer: Engineer who made marketing mistakes

[Futurepower(R)]

This article explains: Coup at AMD: Why was Dirk Meyer Pushed Out? Quote:

"Remember, Dirk Meyer's three deadly sins were:

1) Failure to Execute: K8/Hammer/AMD64 was 18 months late, Barcelona was deliberately delayed by 9 months, original Bulldozer was scrapped and is running 22 months late.

"2) Giving the netbook market to Intel [AMD created the first netbook as a part of OLPC project] and long delays of Barcelona and Bulldozer architectures.

"3) Completely missing the perspective on handheld space - selling Imageon to Qualcomm, Xilleon to BroadCom."

There is a comment at the bottom of this poor-quality article in the Inquirer that says Dirk Meyer "was the lead engineer who designed the Athlon, Opteron and the DEC Alpha. Let's not forget that from 1999-2006, AMD actually had better processors than Intel, and this was due to Dirk Meyer's technology."

Talk to the Oracle.

[Deathlizard]

Considering their market cap, and Oracle's interest in chip companies, It wouldn't surprise me if Larry Ellison isn't their next CEO.