Three high-ranking AMD executives step down

by Mark Tyson on 13 January 2015, 09:26

Tags: AMD (NYSE:AMD)

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Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announced the departure of three senior executives on Monday. The General Manager of Computing and Graphics Business Group, John Byrne; Chief Marketing Officer, Colette LaForce; and Chief Strategy Officer, Raj Naik are all stepping down following recent layoffs and the appointment of new CEO, Dr Lisa Su, reports Reuters.

The significant shakeup of AMD's executive lineup is among the first public actions by Su since her promotion in October. It comes in the wake of AMD's business reorganisation effort which started in 2014. The newly appointed CEO hopes to reduce the loss of market share to Intel Corp and to sustain and revamp the firm's profitability and sales growth. The firm announced plans in October to trim its workforce by around 7 per cent.

"These changes, including the additions of Forrest Norrod and James Clifford to our management team last quarter, collectively are part of implementing an optimal organization design and leadership team to further sharpen our execution and position AMD for growth," AMD said in a statement in announcing the departures.

AMD's stock market value has halved since 2011, loosing ground to the much-larger Intel which holds a market share of over 82 per cent in PC processors, a business that accounts for much of AMD's revenue. Its progress in expanding into new markets such as games consoles and low-power servers has also been lengthier than demanded by Wall Street.

Su will assume Byrne's responsibilities during the period which the company conducts an external search for his replacement, as shown above in the management structure chart. In addition, AMD mentioned in the filing that it is issuing retention stock awards to Chief Financial Officer Devinder Kumar and Chief Technical Officer Mark Papermaster.

"These changes to the leadership team reporting into our CEO are a part of implementing an optimal organization design and leadership team to drive AMD’s future growth," said Drew Prairie, a spokesman for the California-based company, adding that all three executives are leaving AMD to "pursue new opportunities."

AMD CEO, Dr Lisa Su, recently gave an exclusive interview to HEXUS.

HEXUS Forums :: 3 Comments

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Posted by GuidoLS - Tue 13 Jan 2015 11:38
Traditionally, layoffs aren't normally a tool for moving forward anything but the bottom line of lining the pockets of the shareholders. The stepping down of 3 top executives also does NOT inspire confidence.

I'll readily admit I'm an Nvidia bigot, and have been for a long, long time. That being said, I was, for the longest time, an AMD cpu fanatic, and have hoped, rather fervently, that AMD would make an actual competitor to the Intel offerings, like they did back in the days of the T-Bird. Again, this doesn't actually inspire any confidence that this is their current agenda.

I hope I'm wrong, but I also hope that AMD isn't secretly hitching their wagon exclusively to the Internet of Things, or dropping x86/64 in favor of ARM. Internet of Things, especially, is just a monster of a disaster waiting to happen.
Posted by KendrickDM - Tue 13 Jan 2015 17:42
Matters may change if ARM put a terabyte of RRAM on its GPU/CPU processor dies for the same price as the equivalent Intel chip since RRAM favours the older 20nm component density used by ARM and does it say this year. A lot of home enthusiasts would really love not to pay for external memory not to mention server farms.
Posted by bmdc - Tue 13 Jan 2015 22:33
I'm not a fan of this Lisa Su lady. As a fan of AMD graphic cards, I'm severely disappointed in their lack of any official word on the 3xx series cards. Very few people care about APU's and EVERYONE, myself included are waiting on some sort of response to Nvidia's 9xx series. If they dont hurry up, Nvidia is going to completely dominate the market. We need these two companies competing to keep the innovation juices flowing. When AMD and Nvidia compete, the customer wins.