| By Maureen O'Gara |
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| May 19, 2008 07:45 AM EDT |
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AMD has kissed Mario Rivas good-bye and turned processor development over to Randy Allan, the head of its star-crossed server and workstation business, reporting to president and COO Dirk Meyer. Allan is now the new head of AMD’s Computing Solutions Group, responsible for the bulk of the company’s revenues.
The company also set up a newfangled centralized engineering operation that’s supposed to focus AMD’s engineers and IP portfolio on “the strong business opportunities in front of us,” Meyer said in a statement.
AMD is praying new blood can find a way to the sustained profitability that has eluded it.
Meanwhile, presumably anticipating the revelation of AMD’s save-the-company asset lite strategy that it’s been promising to delineate for a year DigiTimes claims – based on unidentified sources – that AMD is planning to outsource both CPU and GPU production to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) in the second half.
It says TSMC has started testing a SOI manufacturing process “to land orders for AMD’s Fusion CPUs.”
The paper speculates that AMD could then sell off some of its manufacturing equipment and lower operating costs.
Anyway, Allen has been with AMD for 24 years and ran engineering, responsible for the development of the Athlon 64 and the Opteron, AMD’s one success story.
The new Central Engineering organization will be run by Chekib Akrout, who is coming over to AMD from Freescale Semiconductor, and Jeff VerHeul, the AMD’s corporate VP of design engineering.
Together they are responsible for AMD's technology and product roadmaps in partnership with AMD’s business units and will also report directly to Meyer.
Akrout was VP of design technology at Freescale and worked for AMD’s technology partner, IBM, before that responsible for the many-core Cell processor and embedded PowerPC cores.
VerHeul is an IBM alumnus too.
AMD said it also promoted Allen Sockwell to senior VP, human resources and so-called chief talent officer responsible for developing AMD’s “leadership assets and employee talent.”
Sockwell replaces Michel Cadieux, who like Rivas is leaving the company “to pursue new opportunities.”
A statement issued had Meyer saying that “placing experienced leaders in new more focused role will enhance our execution and progress towards sustained profitability and long-term success.”
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