AMD's SVP for Marketing to Exit, Leaving Behind Stellar Legacy
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The man credited with making the global CPU industry a two-horse race once again in the public mind is leaving next month the company he helped put back on the map. Henri Richard, who put a personable, approachable, practical face on AMD as its senior vice president for marketing over the past five years, will pursue other interests outside the PC industry, AMD confirmed last night.
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Intel racked up some serious karmic debt when it schemed to run AMD out of the PC processor business. Xeon now languishes in Opteronâs shadow, which strikes me as just desserts for some nasty business.
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Blog: Bad: AMD lost $600 million in the second quarter. Good: Chip shipments surged.
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Reaction to AMD acquisition? Investors who argue that AMD should sell off its ATI discrete graphics operation will take heart from market research published today which shows the chip maker's GPU division saw its market share fall in all segments during Q3.â¦
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Concerns over AMD's succession plans come at a difficult time for the company, and revive that old tug-of-war between marketing and engineering.
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The last processor of the chip family is due Monday, signaling the end of a dynasty that never was.
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Some critics say RISC's time has passed. Sun Microsystems' David Yen has another idea.
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AMD's Triple-Core Phenom processor, which will hit desktops at the beginning of next year, may be the oddball that the CPU market never expected. BetaNews spoke at length to one of the people who came up with the idea: AMD's desktop brand manager Simon Solotko. Is there enough of a market in-between high-end dual core and low-end quad-core, to sneak in a running attack up the middle?
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The Story: Sun Microsystems has been in and out of the (metaphorical) grave more often than Count Dracula. The one-time king of the Internet servers suffered a body blow when the dot-com bubble burst, and since then it?s been a struggle to keep the company?s name on the buy lists of enterprise IT shoppers. That struggle has been chronicled by endless stories in the trade and financial press with headlines featuring bad puns like ?The Sun is setting.?                                                    Those days are finally, if quietly, coming to a close.[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]In less than two years in the CEO?s chair, Jonathan Schwartz has put the company firmly in the black and, after years of bleeding, resuscitated Sun?s flagging software business and storage businesses, and put together a product road map that Morgan Stanley analyst Katherine Hubert calls its strongest in years.?You have to credit Schwartz because he understands the way to combine hardware and software,? says Bud Mathaisel, CIO of outsourced-IT provider Achievo. ?Although Sun?s image slipped from public view, they were making very competitive technology and pricing.?Sun?s line of Galaxy and blade servers are hits across a wide swatch of businesses, and its storage business is growing. Sun has already entered the market for quad-core servers (while rival AMD?s Barcelona remains problem-plagued), and in the next year or so Sun will roll out new server, storage, and networking products. Also, Sun acquired SeeBeyond in August 2007, a $387 million buy that positions Sun to become a vendor of choice in the race to provide the integration tools needed to support enterprises? SOA strategies.The powerful new hardware lineup, plus the enterprise service bus that came with SeeBeyond once again makes Sun core to the datacenter.Not all of the credit goes to Schwartz, of course. His predecessor, cofounder Scott McNealy, poured hundreds of millions into R&amp;D in the dark days of 2002 and created the UltraSparc T1 (or Niagara), the server chip that?s keeping Sun competitive with larger rivals IBM, HP, and Dell.What?s more, McNealy had the foresight to bring back hardware wizard Andy Bechtolsheim in 2004. Bechtolsheim led Sun efforts to design the AMD Opteron-based Sun Fire x64 servers ? better known by their code name ?Galaxy? ? that were key to Sun?s datacenter reentry.The Bottom Line: Sun?s transition from leader to laggard and back to contender has been very painful, particularly because of the deeps cuts in personnel Sun has been forced to make. But the numbers ? four profitable quarters in a row plus record margins ? as well as a growing list of wins, point to a company on the upswing. Sun may not be at the top of everybody?s vendor list, but once again, it?s worth your consideration.Complete list of 2007 underreported tech stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
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HP IS TO release the final Alpha processor on Monday bringing to an end the chip that had a cult following for the last 14 years.
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With Christmas just 11 days away, you have to wonder what Hector Ruiz is going to find under his tree. It&#8217;s been a terrible year for Advanced Micro Devices, and the chipmaker&#8217;s analysts conference on Thursday did nothing to spread holiday cheer.Confirming what many in the chip world had suspected for some time, CEO Ruiz and other AMD execs fessed up that bugs in its new quad-core Barcelona server and Phenom desktop chips will&#160;delay these key next-generation technologies.The technical problems will delay general availability of the fastest version of the chips for three or four months. Customers willing to settle for slower clock speeds will be able to get the processors sooner; for example, AMD will ship a 2 gigahertz version of the Barcelona first, instead of the expected 2.5 gigahertz speed. In either case, the chips will be close to a year late; the original target date was the first quarter of 2007.AMD STUMBLES AS INTEL SPEEDS AHEADThe problem couldn&#8217;t come at a worse time. AMD has struggled all year to close the performance gap between its high-end chips and Intel&#8217;s. Barcelona, the company had promised, would restore its technical supremacy. Indeed some analysts said they had expected the quad-core server chip to do just that. &#8220;At 2.5 gigahertz it would have beaten any Intel products,&#8221; said analyst Nathan Brookwood of Insight64. &#8220;But at 2 gigahertz, it&#8217;s bringing up the rear,&#8221; he said.Intel, meanwhile, has corrected many of the problems that dogged it earlier in the decade. &#8220;AMD isn&#8217;t competing against the Intel of two years ago,&#8221; said Dean McCarron of Mercury Research. Intel has had quad-core chips in the market for about a year. To be fair, its chips are based on a somewhat simpler design; Intel gets to four cores by packaging two dual-core chips together. By contrast, AMD&#8217;s design integrates four cores on one chip, a more efficient solution, said McCarron. Except that AMD&#8217;s approach reduces yields and thus raises manufacturing costs, he added.There was earlier speculation that Barcelona&#8217;s problems were related to the ATI graphics chipset, but the problem turns out to be deeper, at the chip level. AMD has said it is related to the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) in the processor&#39;s L3 cache.DOUBTS ABOUT A QUICK FIXIn the Thursday conference, analysts had expected discussion of the company&#8217;s &#8220;asset light strategy,&#8221; which will apparently entail outsourcing more manufacturing to foundries such as Chartered Semiconductor or TSMC. But they didn&#8217;t get it, and the lack of details made CEO Ruiz&#8217;s promise to return to profitability in 2008 less credible to Wall Street. AMD&#8217;s financial performance has been terrible, losing money for four straight quarters. Part of the reason: Intel and AMD have engaged in a bloody price war, a struggle that has been very tough on the smaller company&#8217;s profit margins. But the Barcelona and Phenom delays are serious self-inflicted wounds.AMD&#8217;s stock lost another few points yesterday and has now shed about 40% in the last two months and a bone-jarring 56% since the beginning of the year. At $8.84 a share, Thursday&#8217;s closing price, the stock is at its lowest ebb since the summer of 2003. Ironically, AMD has so far&#160;rewarded Ruiz with pay raises.
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In its multi-faceted campaign to wrest back the title of performance leader in consumers' minds, AMD is leveraging its fusion with ATI and ATI's cooperation with Microsoft to make a bold new case for itself: Now that the Windows Vista era is upon us, AMD's executives and managers believe the time has come to throw out the old XP-based benchmarks, and re-evaluate AMD's current line of processors using more updated metrics.
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Everything must go by 2015 Sun Microsystems plans to give up on data centers by 2015. How do you like that?â¦
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(InfoWorld) - The former chief executive of ATI Technologies has resigned from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) just nine months after the two companies combined in aÂ $5.4 billion merger. AMD said Tuesday that David Orton will resign as executive vice president after working through the end of this month. AMD had convinced Orton to remain with the company byÂ signing him to a $1.7 million contractÂ in October, shortly before completing the merger. As the president and CEO of ATI, Orton led efforts to compete with rival Nvidia in the building of high-end graphics boards for PCs, as well as cellphones, smartphones, and gaming consoles. By acquiring ATI, AMD hoped to become more competitive with Intel by creating aÂ single "Fusion" chipÂ that integrates its x86 microprocessor with ATI's graphics processor on a single piece of silicon. AMD wanted to retain Orton along with his ATI colleagues because of his ability to push ATI to success in the graphics, chip set, and consumer-electronics markets, said Dirk Meyer, AMD's president and chief operating officer, in a statement released Tuesday. However, AMD expects it will take until 2009 to complete the engineering necessary to bring the new Fusion chip to market. In the meantime, the chip vendor has been suffering from the effects of aÂ price warÂ that has made just a small dent in the profits of its much larger rival Intel. By contrast, AMD has watched its profits sink into the red, reportingÂ losses of $611 millionÂ and $574 million for its past two fiscal quarters. In a search for operating cash, AMD even decided to sell off a stake of the company,Â raising $2.2 billionÂ through the sale of convertible notes to institutional investors. That financial pressure may have been one factor contributing to Orton's departure. In a statement released Tuesday, Orton said he still had faith in the companies' merger strategy. "It is with mixed feelings that I am leaving AMD," Orton said. "I am very optimistic about AMD's future. I believe strongly in the strategies that brought AMD and ATI together and the talented employees of the 'new AMD' who are committed to winning in the market." In the wake of Orton's departure, AMD said that its CEO Hector Ruiz would now be the direct supervisor of Adrian Hartog, senior vice president and general manager for the consumer electronics group, and Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager for the graphics products group. Also this week, AMD renewed its determination to continue its price war with Intel, announcing Monday that it wasÂ cutting prices on its range of desktop PC chips, from the top-end Athlon 64 FX through the Athlon 64 X2 and Sempron families. In the longer term, AMD hopes to regain profitability with itsÂ "Barcelona" quad-core Opteron server chip. AMD plans to launch that processor in August to compete with Intel's dual-core "Woodcrest" and quad-core "Clovertown" Xeon processors launched last year, and quad-core "Harpertown" server chip due out in the fourth quarter of 2007. AMD may provide more details on Orton's departure and its new strategies when the vendor reports second-quarter fiscal 2007 earnings on July 19. Â
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IBM&#39;s expected decision to sell its $11.5 billion PC business would mark the end of an era and dramatically reshape the systems landscape, posing
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After a bout of good fortune, AMD finds itself coming to grips with a resurgent Intel. Plus: Can software keep up with multicore technology?
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Blog: Bad: AMD lost $600 million this quarter. Good: Chip shipments surged.