AMD Names Rory Read as New CEO
by Andrew Cunningham on August 25, 2011 12:20 PM ESTAMD has finally chosen a new CEO: Rory Read has been selected to fill the position that Dirk Meyer vacated in January. Read was previously President and COO of Lenovo, where he has overseen a period of solid growth in worldwide market share. Before that, Read was an executive at IBM; he moved to Lenovo when it acquired IBM's PC business in 2004.
Read will have challenges at AMD, but two stick out in my mind: the first is that they should be thinking seriously about chips for smartphones and tablets (something cited when Meyer was removed from the position), and the second is that he'll need to improve the CPU division's timeliness. Their products, while often competitive in budget and mainstream PCs, have had trouble challenging Intel's, and new CPU designs from the company often ship late.
Source: Marketwire
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Silver47 - Thursday, August 25, 2011 - link
Good news for AMD but like Andrew said they do need to get their CPU division into gear and releasing faster.Also does AMD own a ARM License? Might be a worthwhile investment as they certainly have the talent to build there own CPU and GPU ARM based chip and compete against Nvidia.
DanNeely - Thursday, August 25, 2011 - link
Probably not. I'd assume they sold it along with the division that used to make ARM chips for them during the recession.IlllI - Thursday, August 25, 2011 - link
"AMD Says "No Thanks" to Smartphone Business"http://www.dailytech.com/AMD+Says+No+Thanks+to+Sma...
Andrew.a.cunningham - Thursday, August 25, 2011 - link
New CEO could mean new developments on that front. If there's money in it, there's always a chance AMD could jump in.Cow86 - Thursday, August 25, 2011 - link
Except AMD already stated they wouldn't because it's too far out of their current capabilities....they simply can't scale bobcat that low, or not without a lot of R&D they can't muster...I'd say they're much smarter sticking to just tablets and notebooks with bobcat, and leaving smartphones for what they are for now, they don't have the capabilities/funds to compete there on short term...Meyer realized this.Intel, with all its resources, also still hasn't gained any ground there, and I kind of doubt their upcoming atom will make headway in smartphones as well, what with Tegra 3, quadcore ARM, coming and such. But we shall see, I may be proven wrong...I'd like AMD to succeed, so I say let 'em bring it and prove me wrong :P
Medallish - Thursday, August 25, 2011 - link
lol AMD already has a deal with Lenovo, why would HP think that a former Lenovo leader would be uninterested in dealing with HP?Why is this your dream? isn't it better to have two competing companies, so we get innovations like, AMD64, IMC, Interconnect, APU's all things Intel didn't make until long after AMD(And Timna was never released), clearly there's a benifit in having two companies both fighting extremely hard to please you, the consumer. an Intel monopoly would be a tragedy, and basically the death of the PC market until someone else comes along.
silverblue - Friday, August 26, 2011 - link
I wouldn't bite too much, sans2212 has been slating AMD on here for the past year or so. Incidentally, SiliconDoc moved on from here to somewhere else as well.Slayeristight - Friday, August 26, 2011 - link
AMD need's someone to push them in to the present and get out of the past! They have been falling futher behind every year after Core 2 chips came out. In a few years I bet we see mainstream and budget PCs disapear and be replaced by tablets. That will leave no market for AMD chips as they can't compete at the Server / Highend PC and have nothing for Smartphones / Tablets. They will just fade away or just switch to making GPU's.Medallish - Friday, August 26, 2011 - link
Except they aren't in the past, at all! the only thing you're looking at is performance, AMD is keeping up on pretty much everything else, and seeing the APU, one could argue AMD has it's own advantages that Intel will probably never have. AMD is currently on the right path, but yeah don't expect a less than 10bn company to be as quick as a 120bn company(Intel)cfaalm - Friday, August 26, 2011 - link
In the past or left behind?Right now I'd say they got one leg in the now (Brazos and graphics) and one leg in yesteryear (Phenom II). We don't even know if Bulldozer is really high end yet. If not then they still have an interesting road ahead. So from here, good luck Rory Read. I hope you can bring AMD back on top where we'd like them to be i.e. competitive in the high end.