Not for many of us. I remember reading somewhere right after Lisa Su was brought in that she was CEO caliber talent. She most certainly has the engineering background that AMD needs running the company.
As soon as they announced that the COO position was being recreated and filled by her, I knew she would be the next AMD CEO. And that was not all that long ago.
AMD now has an amazing group of engineers running the company. Watch what they pump out over the next 24 months. It should be spectacular!
Well, 2, 3 and 4 sucked balls, so good luck to her. AMD needs to get their sh!t together. In absence of any competition Intel has treated CPU pricing like it's carved in stone. And nVidia has last produced an amazing bang for the buck when the GeForce 460 had to follow the amazing Radeon 5970.
I don't think #4 was bad. Read did exactly what was required of him. They are in better shape than they have been for a long time. Winning the consoles, apus, arm etc should see them profitable and diversified. I hope they can then execute some improvements on their gpu and cpus. They seem to be heading towards that with their recent hire s. A strong AMD is necessary for a competitive market to exist whether or not you like or use Amd or Intel.
Reed has been pretty ok for AMD, but sucked for consumers because in their diversification they've abandoned just as many markets as they've gained, they've not expanded but gone sideways. AMD is (only slightly) smaller now than when Reed took over, but the CPU/GPU part of the business is a shadow of its former self. The console business has been good because there's been a new generation but that will decline and there's many years to the next new business. I'd also be greatly concerned that with their much lower and thinly spread R&D their base CPU/GPU technology is falling behind Intel/nVidia leading to their eventual demise, Still, they looked to be circling the drain a while and has got a breathing space so it might still be the best of several poor options.
What? Rory was fine, the massive losses from three years ago have narrowed to the point of expecting a profit next year, the graphics arm has come back in a big way, no losing to NVIDIA only in some areas of public perception, and the AMD is now a much more diversified business.
That's a pretty solid success to mark down for a turnaround CEO, I'm sure for example that Sony would love to say it may well expect to operate at a profit next year. I'm surprised he's actually leaving, as turnaround CEOs in a competitive field from a big hole don't usually do much at all, that AMD appears to be almost saved is an unqualified success.
Indeed; e.g. Bulldozer was not Read's fault since project Orochi was essentially done before he jumped in, and the rest of the AMD stuff was and is OK - Radeons are doing pretty well on average all of this time, so do all the APUs, if you consider them a kind of balanced budgetary offerings. So, IMHO, CEOs # 2 (Ruiz) and # 3 (Meyer) were questionable, not # 4 (Read).
Meyer, while a great engineer, just didn't take the steps necessary to make AMD profitable. Diversifying was something that he should have done much more aggressively, especially since AMD actually had the capital at that point.
Ruiz was an unethical fool. There's not much more to say about him.
As much as Bulldozer was not Rorys fault, this is not his achievement either. Tahiti was launched almost 3 years ago, so GCN was done when he took over. Frankly, seeing there has not been any tangible update to GCN with any significant real-world improvements in those 3 years I don't think it was his acomplishment to "bring back graphics in a big way". It rather looks like they're loosing it, focusing on obscure features like True Audio which may or may not one day yield nice results in some games.
Don't forget that in the past 3 years, AMD has been focused on integrating GCN into their APU's, Its only been in roughly the past year that we have seen APU's with GCN inside. And we have been seeing incremental improvements to GCN as well. The R9 285 is just the latest of those, There have been others as well. GCN today is a better GCN than what was out there 3 years ago. AMD is not calling these incremental improvements a specific number (but some of the media has been), but I believe that in the next 9 months, we will finally see GCN 2.0 and that it will be much more powerful than anything AMD has right now.
What? How was Hector Ruiz a bad CEO? He led the Athlon-era, negotiating engineering talent from Alpha (which HP dissolved) and bringing unprecedented quality control to AMD, something he was well known for at Motorola (back in the 90's when Motorola had the lowest defect rate of communication equipment across the globe.)
The errata bug the plagued the first Phenoms was under his watch. I believe that was undoing and the fact that Intel kept beating him to products that AMD annouced before Intel, like quad cores. The Bulldozer architectures were philospohy failures that didn't make sense because AMD's IPC wins were the reason Intel produced the Core series procs. Also, those new CPUs couldn't beat the previous AMD CPUs, nevermind compete with Intel. It sent them back five years in the x86 market.
I want to buy AMD, but I can't justify it based on the stagnant desktop procs and chipsets. With all that failure, the fact AMD is now close to being profitable is a feather in Read's hat.
Ruiz definitely deserves some credit for their CPU leadership with K8, but he played a large negative role in their current quagmire with GloFo, as he was the one that orchestrated the sale of AMD's fabs to ATIC and negotiated the horrible Wafer Supply Agreements that continue to sandbag and choke AMD to this day.
Shortly after he leaves AMD, we see why, he also negotiated himself a cherry new role as CEO of GloFo, but forced to leave the role shortly after amidst allegations of insider trading improprieties.
Oh, and the overpayment for ATI also happened under his watch. So yeah, can't say Ruiz should be remembered favorably, much of AMD's heavy debt position can be directly attributed to executive decisions made by him and his board.
Ruiz would have had little to do with K8, which released only one year after he took the reigns. Ruiz pretty much single-handedly destroyed AMD, and is responsible for the failure that was the original Phenom.
Hmm yep you're right, I thought Ruiz took the reins in 2000, but it was actually 2002. So yeah I guess he was pretty worthless overall. Referring to original Phenom, you're talking about the TLB errata bug? Overall I thought Phenom was actually decent lol, certainly much more competitive than Bulldozer ended up. I can remember the day Bulldozer review launched and just being floored how bad Bulldozer was, to the point Phenom II was as fast or faster in many respects.
Talking CPUs now :) You're right, Phenom II had better IPC on old code (up to SSE3) than even Bulldozer v2 aka Piledriver, not even mentioning original (2011) Bulldozer v1. More than that, even Phenom I (on 65 nm) had better IPC on old code than all Bulldozer/Piledriver stuff...
I owned and benched both Phenom I and Phenom II in 2008-2009, so, looking at the Bulldozer fiasco, I decided to switch to Intel CPUs. That's what I did last year (shiny new Haswell build, now Devil's Canyon i7 - it really rocks leaps and bounds around any AMD, of course).
BTW, digging a bit into the recent history, Meyer was fired in the beginning of 2011 - right after SB release. So I still have an assumption that letting him go had to do something (at least partially) with the release of Sandy Bridge on LGA1155 at the moment. When Gesher was released to public and was celebrated everywhere (because SB ROCKED at the time, and is still good even now), I guess, Bulldozer was already around the ES stage, and AMD internally was already aware of its (poor) performance. So, after SB release, AMD board of directors may realised, that BD will inevitably fail in comparison, and fired Meyer immediately, because, being a CPU engineer and CEO, he was responsible for this situation. But, of course, this may be just a "conspiracy theory" around that 2011 events.
Hah on my gaming machine I'm still rocking a Phenom II x6 CPU. I'm in the same boat too though, I would like to purchase AMD but their products have been sub par. I built a desktop with a GCN integrated CPU for the family, but my new laptop and convertible purchased have been Intel powered. Hopefully they release something substantial!
Rory knew from almost day 1, if not sooner that AMD was a stabilization project for him. He also knew that one AMD was stabilized, that his job there would be over. He came in, worked with the engineers to find new bisunesses for AMD, and worked one getting AMD financially on a stable track. While AMD is not yet profitable, they are expected to be within 1 year, and for AMD that will be a major milestone. The company has always been either racking in the profits (for a couple years here and there), or losing money by the trainloads. AMD has managed to be cash stable now for over a year, with roughly $1 billion in the bank during that time.
So Rory did a great job. He stabilized the company financially, brought back old AMD engineers that had vision in the past for AMD, and brought in new people, including Lisa Su, nearly all of who are renowned engineers, to lead the company.
Rory did his job, and it appears that he did it very well. And he knew that his job was finished. Now it is up to Lisa Su to continue what he started and expand greatly on it, while maintaining the financial stability that Rory has worked so hard to stabilize.
I believe that 5 years from now, we will all look back and see the fruits of Rory and Lisa's hard work in the past 3 years. I believe that we will see a profitable AMD that it putting out new products in new markets and which may even be pushing Intel to innovate again. Hopefully AMD surprises us with a few things, and starts making lots and lots of money.
Even supporting AMD as their HW customer for around 10 years till present, I would say you are probably overly optimistic... Time will tell, however, how things will develop in the future.
Read has only turned the company around in the short term, and the majority of that turnaround has been by reducing headcount, cutting R&D, and taking on a ton of long term debt. Their debt-to-equity ratio has jumped from .003 in March of 2011 to 4.411 today. And if the results for Q3 are poor, then look for that to go up yet again. Read has restructured their debt paybacks from 2015 to 2019+, and frankly that's about the only good thing I can say that AMD has done during his tenure. Their 'profitability' was only non-GAAP, which means 'ignore GAAP'.
No one is going to read this, but it's now (nearly) five years since this post, and after the release or Ryzen 3000 and Epyc 7002, I thought it's apt to mention the wisdom in Mark_gb's comments.
Rory did a fantastic job stabilizing the company, but by far his best decision was hiring Lisa Su.
Great to see these decision paying off towards the end of the decade.
Nah, Rory had no interest in gaming or graphics, which was actually a big part of the problem imo. AMD had a CEO that was generally disinterested in their products.
I feel like Read should have stayed on for a extra year, if only to make sure AMD doesn't start bleeding again so soon after the company has been turned around.
Good for her! Please bring back the much loved AMD userspace. For a while things have been tanking. don't let that board of AMD keep you down! time to inovate :D
Great. That will mean better products for us, and better competition in the comming years. She is by far the best CEO AMD have ever had. By a long stretch. Its about time.
I don't like the timing. In a few they will public their third quarter results. So why step down now?
Are the results so bad that they needed to change the CEO before those results become public? Are they so bad that Rory was forced to step down because no one was patient enough after seeing those results to keep him even for a few more days on the helm?
I don't think so. From what I've seen, if they were that bad, they would have kept him around so they could throw him under the bus when the numbers went public. That way, they make a bit of a spectacle of tossing out the loser that dragged Q3 down, then great fanfare about how they're moving in an exciting new direction. That is, putting someone in charge that actually has a clue about what sort of business they're running and won't just glaze over when the pocket-protector set makes their quarterly reports.
(Don't get me wrong, I'm not really bagging on Read. Turning around AMD is no small feat. But, the guy's been a suit forever. I think someone with qualifications like Su's might be the right fit to lead a refreshed, diversified AMD.)
Results are not going to be good so it is prudent to switch CEO with a proven COO first in order to lighten the "fall" when the stock prices drive. Lisa has plenty of influence in China and Asian market so it is important that these areas where Intel is having difficulty getting BayTrail/Cherry Trial chips to oems. Hoefully, AMD can do better with their offerings starting with a good iGP solution. ALthough the prices need to drop further to get users on the game. Besides, there would be a need for Dual boot Android and Ubuntu Touch machines as a home desktop replacement.
I am sorry, what? Why does Lisa 'have plenty of influence in China and Asian market' when her entire academic and professional background dating back to 1986 is based in the United States? I don't even see any indications she was born outside of the US, and even if she were from, say, Taiwan she would have come from there long before they were a player in technology.
Oh wait, she looks Asian. That automatically means she has 'influence' in Asia. I forgot how that works.
Yes, fte is right. I know it is considered racist in western world. But as an Asian who spent equal amount of the last 3 decades at both sides, I can tell you the east are somewhat behind their western counterparts in racial equality. Having an Asian CEO will help AMD image in the east, regardless of the actual citizenship/cultural background.
It's nice to see engineers running a tech company. Hopefully they'll put at least a little effort into CPU architecture again. I don't think anyone really wants to see Vishera parts in anything in 2016.
"AMD now has a number of very capable engineers leading the company at multiple levels, including Lisa, CTO Mark Papermaster, and K12 designer Jim Keller, so the company should be in a good position going forward."
Each time there is a change in AMD's leadership team, it's always "the company should be in a good position going forward".
It's the same tune singing over and over again. It's been 8 years.
AMD is not in a good position to go forward because the fab side is holding them back. And the worst is that there is no alternative for them.
Lisa Su as CEO and Mark Papermaster as CTO, the two most sensitive positions at AMD are filled by very talented people. Best of luck, I think AMD can make a mark in history again.
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Nehemoth - Wednesday, October 8, 2014 - link
UnexpectedMark_gb - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link
Not for many of us. I remember reading somewhere right after Lisa Su was brought in that she was CEO caliber talent. She most certainly has the engineering background that AMD needs running the company.As soon as they announced that the COO position was being recreated and filled by her, I knew she would be the next AMD CEO. And that was not all that long ago.
AMD now has an amazing group of engineers running the company. Watch what they pump out over the next 24 months. It should be spectacular!
icano69 - Tuesday, October 13, 2020 - link
Lol... reading you 6 years later is kinda funny! zen 3 FTWtim851 - Wednesday, October 8, 2014 - link
>making her the 5th CEO in the company’s historyWell, 2, 3 and 4 sucked balls, so good luck to her. AMD needs to get their sh!t together. In absence of any competition Intel has treated CPU pricing like it's carved in stone. And nVidia has last produced an amazing bang for the buck when the GeForce 460 had to follow the amazing Radeon 5970.
Come on Liz!
dihartnell - Wednesday, October 8, 2014 - link
I don't think #4 was bad. Read did exactly what was required of him. They are in better shape than they have been for a long time. Winning the consoles, apus, arm etc should see them profitable and diversified. I hope they can then execute some improvements on their gpu and cpus. They seem to be heading towards that with their recent hire s. A strong AMD is necessary for a competitive market to exist whether or not you like or use Amd or Intel.Kjella - Thursday, October 9, 2014 - link
Reed has been pretty ok for AMD, but sucked for consumers because in their diversification they've abandoned just as many markets as they've gained, they've not expanded but gone sideways. AMD is (only slightly) smaller now than when Reed took over, but the CPU/GPU part of the business is a shadow of its former self. The console business has been good because there's been a new generation but that will decline and there's many years to the next new business. I'd also be greatly concerned that with their much lower and thinly spread R&D their base CPU/GPU technology is falling behind Intel/nVidia leading to their eventual demise, Still, they looked to be circling the drain a while and has got a breathing space so it might still be the best of several poor options.Frenetic Pony - Wednesday, October 8, 2014 - link
What? Rory was fine, the massive losses from three years ago have narrowed to the point of expecting a profit next year, the graphics arm has come back in a big way, no losing to NVIDIA only in some areas of public perception, and the AMD is now a much more diversified business.That's a pretty solid success to mark down for a turnaround CEO, I'm sure for example that Sony would love to say it may well expect to operate at a profit next year. I'm surprised he's actually leaving, as turnaround CEOs in a competitive field from a big hole don't usually do much at all, that AMD appears to be almost saved is an unqualified success.
TiGr1982 - Wednesday, October 8, 2014 - link
Indeed; e.g. Bulldozer was not Read's fault since project Orochi was essentially done before he jumped in, and the rest of the AMD stuff was and is OK - Radeons are doing pretty well on average all of this time, so do all the APUs, if you consider them a kind of balanced budgetary offerings. So, IMHO, CEOs # 2 (Ruiz) and # 3 (Meyer) were questionable, not # 4 (Read).Homeles - Thursday, October 9, 2014 - link
Meyer, while a great engineer, just didn't take the steps necessary to make AMD profitable. Diversifying was something that he should have done much more aggressively, especially since AMD actually had the capital at that point.Ruiz was an unethical fool. There's not much more to say about him.
MrSpadge - Thursday, October 9, 2014 - link
"the graphics arm has come back in a big way"As much as Bulldozer was not Rorys fault, this is not his achievement either. Tahiti was launched almost 3 years ago, so GCN was done when he took over. Frankly, seeing there has not been any tangible update to GCN with any significant real-world improvements in those 3 years I don't think it was his acomplishment to "bring back graphics in a big way". It rather looks like they're loosing it, focusing on obscure features like True Audio which may or may not one day yield nice results in some games.
Mark_gb - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link
Don't forget that in the past 3 years, AMD has been focused on integrating GCN into their APU's, Its only been in roughly the past year that we have seen APU's with GCN inside. And we have been seeing incremental improvements to GCN as well. The R9 285 is just the latest of those, There have been others as well. GCN today is a better GCN than what was out there 3 years ago. AMD is not calling these incremental improvements a specific number (but some of the media has been), but I believe that in the next 9 months, we will finally see GCN 2.0 and that it will be much more powerful than anything AMD has right now.Samus - Thursday, October 9, 2014 - link
What? How was Hector Ruiz a bad CEO? He led the Athlon-era, negotiating engineering talent from Alpha (which HP dissolved) and bringing unprecedented quality control to AMD, something he was well known for at Motorola (back in the 90's when Motorola had the lowest defect rate of communication equipment across the globe.)eanazag - Thursday, October 9, 2014 - link
The errata bug the plagued the first Phenoms was under his watch. I believe that was undoing and the fact that Intel kept beating him to products that AMD annouced before Intel, like quad cores. The Bulldozer architectures were philospohy failures that didn't make sense because AMD's IPC wins were the reason Intel produced the Core series procs. Also, those new CPUs couldn't beat the previous AMD CPUs, nevermind compete with Intel. It sent them back five years in the x86 market.I want to buy AMD, but I can't justify it based on the stagnant desktop procs and chipsets. With all that failure, the fact AMD is now close to being profitable is a feather in Read's hat.
chizow - Thursday, October 9, 2014 - link
Ruiz definitely deserves some credit for their CPU leadership with K8, but he played a large negative role in their current quagmire with GloFo, as he was the one that orchestrated the sale of AMD's fabs to ATIC and negotiated the horrible Wafer Supply Agreements that continue to sandbag and choke AMD to this day.Shortly after he leaves AMD, we see why, he also negotiated himself a cherry new role as CEO of GloFo, but forced to leave the role shortly after amidst allegations of insider trading improprieties.
Oh, and the overpayment for ATI also happened under his watch. So yeah, can't say Ruiz should be remembered favorably, much of AMD's heavy debt position can be directly attributed to executive decisions made by him and his board.
Homeles - Thursday, October 9, 2014 - link
Ruiz would have had little to do with K8, which released only one year after he took the reigns. Ruiz pretty much single-handedly destroyed AMD, and is responsible for the failure that was the original Phenom.chizow - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link
Hmm yep you're right, I thought Ruiz took the reins in 2000, but it was actually 2002. So yeah I guess he was pretty worthless overall. Referring to original Phenom, you're talking about the TLB errata bug? Overall I thought Phenom was actually decent lol, certainly much more competitive than Bulldozer ended up. I can remember the day Bulldozer review launched and just being floored how bad Bulldozer was, to the point Phenom II was as fast or faster in many respects.TiGr1982 - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link
Talking CPUs now :)You're right, Phenom II had better IPC on old code (up to SSE3) than even Bulldozer v2 aka Piledriver, not even mentioning original (2011) Bulldozer v1.
More than that, even Phenom I (on 65 nm) had better IPC on old code than all Bulldozer/Piledriver stuff...
I owned and benched both Phenom I and Phenom II in 2008-2009, so, looking at the Bulldozer fiasco, I decided to switch to Intel CPUs. That's what I did last year (shiny new Haswell build, now Devil's Canyon i7 - it really rocks leaps and bounds around any AMD, of course).
BTW, digging a bit into the recent history, Meyer was fired in the beginning of 2011 - right after SB release. So I still have an assumption that letting him go had to do something (at least partially) with the release of Sandy Bridge on LGA1155 at the moment. When Gesher was released to public and was celebrated everywhere (because SB ROCKED at the time, and is still good even now), I guess, Bulldozer was already around the ES stage, and AMD internally was already aware of its (poor) performance. So, after SB release, AMD board of directors may realised, that BD will inevitably fail in comparison, and fired Meyer immediately, because, being a CPU engineer and CEO, he was responsible for this situation.
But, of course, this may be just a "conspiracy theory" around that 2011 events.
Myrandex - Wednesday, October 15, 2014 - link
Hah on my gaming machine I'm still rocking a Phenom II x6 CPU. I'm in the same boat too though, I would like to purchase AMD but their products have been sub par. I built a desktop with a GCN integrated CPU for the family, but my new laptop and convertible purchased have been Intel powered. Hopefully they release something substantial!Mark_gb - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link
Rory knew from almost day 1, if not sooner that AMD was a stabilization project for him. He also knew that one AMD was stabilized, that his job there would be over. He came in, worked with the engineers to find new bisunesses for AMD, and worked one getting AMD financially on a stable track. While AMD is not yet profitable, they are expected to be within 1 year, and for AMD that will be a major milestone. The company has always been either racking in the profits (for a couple years here and there), or losing money by the trainloads. AMD has managed to be cash stable now for over a year, with roughly $1 billion in the bank during that time.So Rory did a great job. He stabilized the company financially, brought back old AMD engineers that had vision in the past for AMD, and brought in new people, including Lisa Su, nearly all of who are renowned engineers, to lead the company.
Rory did his job, and it appears that he did it very well. And he knew that his job was finished. Now it is up to Lisa Su to continue what he started and expand greatly on it, while maintaining the financial stability that Rory has worked so hard to stabilize.
I believe that 5 years from now, we will all look back and see the fruits of Rory and Lisa's hard work in the past 3 years. I believe that we will see a profitable AMD that it putting out new products in new markets and which may even be pushing Intel to innovate again. Hopefully AMD surprises us with a few things, and starts making lots and lots of money.
TiGr1982 - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link
Even supporting AMD as their HW customer for around 10 years till present,I would say you are probably overly optimistic...
Time will tell, however, how things will develop in the future.
mrdude - Tuesday, October 14, 2014 - link
Read has only turned the company around in the short term, and the majority of that turnaround has been by reducing headcount, cutting R&D, and taking on a ton of long term debt. Their debt-to-equity ratio has jumped from .003 in March of 2011 to 4.411 today. And if the results for Q3 are poor, then look for that to go up yet again. Read has restructured their debt paybacks from 2015 to 2019+, and frankly that's about the only good thing I can say that AMD has done during his tenure. Their 'profitability' was only non-GAAP, which means 'ignore GAAP'.http://ir.amd.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=74093&p=irol...
aryonoco - Thursday, August 8, 2019 - link
No one is going to read this, but it's now (nearly) five years since this post, and after the release or Ryzen 3000 and Epyc 7002, I thought it's apt to mention the wisdom in Mark_gb's comments.Rory did a fantastic job stabilizing the company, but by far his best decision was hiring Lisa Su.
Great to see these decision paying off towards the end of the decade.
Wreckage - Wednesday, October 8, 2014 - link
I heard Read was caught buying a 970 and was forced to step down.lavaheadache - Wednesday, October 8, 2014 - link
You still troll AMD news? How many years you been at it now?Homeles - Thursday, October 9, 2014 - link
Forget to take your medication yesterday?chizow - Thursday, October 9, 2014 - link
Nah, Rory had no interest in gaming or graphics, which was actually a big part of the problem imo. AMD had a CEO that was generally disinterested in their products.Revolution11 - Wednesday, October 8, 2014 - link
I feel like Read should have stayed on for a extra year, if only to make sure AMD doesn't start bleeding again so soon after the company has been turned around.austinsguitar - Wednesday, October 8, 2014 - link
Good for her! Please bring back the much loved AMD userspace. For a while things have been tanking. don't let that board of AMD keep you down! time to inovate :Dkrumme - Thursday, October 9, 2014 - link
Great. That will mean better products for us, and better competition in the comming years.She is by far the best CEO AMD have ever had. By a long stretch. Its about time.
Homeles - Thursday, October 9, 2014 - link
Something about counting chickens before they hatch.yannigr2 - Thursday, October 9, 2014 - link
I don't like the timing. In a few they will public their third quarter results. So why step down now?Are the results so bad that they needed to change the CEO before those results become public? Are they so bad that Rory was forced to step down because no one was patient enough after seeing those results to keep him even for a few more days on the helm?
fluxtatic - Thursday, October 9, 2014 - link
I don't think so. From what I've seen, if they were that bad, they would have kept him around so they could throw him under the bus when the numbers went public. That way, they make a bit of a spectacle of tossing out the loser that dragged Q3 down, then great fanfare about how they're moving in an exciting new direction. That is, putting someone in charge that actually has a clue about what sort of business they're running and won't just glaze over when the pocket-protector set makes their quarterly reports.(Don't get me wrong, I'm not really bagging on Read. Turning around AMD is no small feat. But, the guy's been a suit forever. I think someone with qualifications like Su's might be the right fit to lead a refreshed, diversified AMD.)
fteoath64 - Thursday, October 9, 2014 - link
Results are not going to be good so it is prudent to switch CEO with a proven COO first in order to lighten the "fall" when the stock prices drive. Lisa has plenty of influence in China and Asian market so it is important that these areas where Intel is having difficulty getting BayTrail/Cherry Trial chips to oems. Hoefully, AMD can do better with their offerings starting with a good iGP solution. ALthough the prices need to drop further to get users on the game. Besides, there would be a need for Dual boot Android and Ubuntu Touch machines as a home desktop replacement.Reflex - Thursday, October 9, 2014 - link
I am sorry, what? Why does Lisa 'have plenty of influence in China and Asian market' when her entire academic and professional background dating back to 1986 is based in the United States? I don't even see any indications she was born outside of the US, and even if she were from, say, Taiwan she would have come from there long before they were a player in technology.Oh wait, she looks Asian. That automatically means she has 'influence' in Asia. I forgot how that works.
PEJUman - Sunday, October 12, 2014 - link
Yes, fte is right. I know it is considered racist in western world. But as an Asian who spent equal amount of the last 3 decades at both sides, I can tell you the east are somewhat behind their western counterparts in racial equality. Having an Asian CEO will help AMD image in the east, regardless of the actual citizenship/cultural background.willis936 - Thursday, October 9, 2014 - link
It's nice to see engineers running a tech company. Hopefully they'll put at least a little effort into CPU architecture again. I don't think anyone really wants to see Vishera parts in anything in 2016.gostan - Thursday, October 9, 2014 - link
"AMD now has a number of very capable engineers leading the company at multiple levels, including Lisa, CTO Mark Papermaster, and K12 designer Jim Keller, so the company should be in a good position going forward."Each time there is a change in AMD's leadership team, it's always "the company should be in a good position going forward".
It's the same tune singing over and over again. It's been 8 years.
AMD is not in a good position to go forward because the fab side is holding them back. And the worst is that there is no alternative for them.
Antronman - Friday, October 17, 2014 - link
If you've been looking at AMD's presentations, and the revival of the COO position, this comes as no surprise.Ms. Su has it all -
The engineering background
Experience at AMD
Management background
Expect to see a lot of good product in the coming years...
atlantico - Saturday, October 25, 2014 - link
Lisa Su as CEO and Mark Papermaster as CTO, the two most sensitive positions at AMD are filled by very talented people. Best of luck, I think AMD can make a mark in history again.