ATI aggression
Turning back to Kenyon, we asked what has prompted all these changed to AMD's channel strategy. "The catalyst for a lot of this change has been the spin-off of GlobalFoundries," said Kenyon.
"Now AMD is about product design, sales and marketing. Also we now have just one product company, challenged with how we can bring CPU and GPU into a place where we can monetise the combination, not just the separate pieces."
This was the reason behind the promotion of Rick Bergman - formerly of ATI and who headed up the graphics product group at AMD - was made overall product boss back in May. You can see Bergman talking to HEXUS.channel about his new role here.
With Grasby also coming from the graphics side of things, we asked Kenyon why AMD is so keen to offer senior roles to the former ATI execs. "The thing the graphics folks bring is the aggressiveness toward the enemy," he said.
"If you talk to any of the graphics executives, they'll talk about running NVIDIA out of business, so the competitive intensity around Bergman - driving that team to really produce to the roadmap - I think is great."