AMD CEO Dirk Meyer Resigns 123
angry tapir writes "Advanced Micro Devices has announced that Dirk Meyer has resigned from the post of CEO, and that the company is beginning to search for a new chief executive. Meyer resigned in a mutual agreement with the board of directors, and the company has appointed Thomas Seifert, the company's chief financial officer, as the interim CEO. Meyer was installed as CEO in 2008 as a replacement to Hector Ruiz, just as the company was making its way out of rough financial times. In October, AMD posted a third-quarter net loss of US$118 million."
Re:Musical chairs (Score:5, Informative)
Personally, I don't blame him, I blame it on Intel and its successful attempts to bribe major equipment integrators to not use AMD chips.
Re:Hard call for GPU selection (Score:5, Informative)
I'm just getting going on GPU programming. I was thinking to go with OpenCL (pushed by AMD/ATI ) over CUDA (pushed by nVidia) because I thought AMD looked more likely to survive in the long term. But now it's getting harder to tell which company is safer to rely upon.
OpenCL works on both AMD and nVidia GPUs , so you should be safe there.
Mobile Failure (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Musical chairs (Score:5, Informative)
No amount of bribes in the world can account for the fact that Intel's latest processors have been significantly outperforming AMD's for the last few years now.
Yet AMDs significantly outperformed Intels for quite a few years.. but only managed 50% market share at its height because of Intels illegal (no "questionable" about it) practices.
Re:Sorry.. (Score:5, Informative)
so the guy that brought AMD to a position where they're successfully launching 3 products in one year (which they've never done before) is not someone you want to keep around? Are you kidding?
Are you honestly asking this question? If you are going to pretend to know anything about the business world, then you should at least pretend to also know that some CEO's are specialists at bringing companies out of financial trouble and even bankruptcy.
For example (from my industry) there is Scott Butera, a CEO that has brought more than one casino out of financial trouble, who has just been picked up by the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut because of its very serious financial troubles (billions in debt, defaulting on loans..)
Often what these specialists bring to the table is their trusted contacts in the financial industries. The primary goal is often to maintain a credit line while the problems are resolved (because no large business can run without credit, regardless of how much cash they have.)
Re:AMD CPUs all over the place (Score:5, Informative)
What does volume matter if you don't have margins?
1. Intel has always been ahead on processing tech, often a generation in front or if not on a more mature process. That means AMD has bigger dies and lower yields, which directly inflate cost.
2. A lot of the expense is R&D, and with Intel having ~80% of the microprocessor market each AMD chip has to carry at least four times as much of the cost as each Intel chip.
3. Intel got a processor to match every one of AMDs, the reverse is not true. Intel makes high margins where they are alone and squeezes AMDs margin where they compete.
Seriously, take a look at something like 3D rendering [anandtech.com] performance, which is usually extremely multi-threading friendly. The 2500K which sells for less than the 1100T is beating it in everything but the POV-ray test. Never mind that it's much faster and better for everything that doesn't take advantage of six cores. The Opteron vs Xeon battle looks the same, AMD had the advantage a while but they're struggling badly now there too. On the low end Intel has the Atom which is raking in money meaning AMD is losing a lot of low-end sales. They're boxed in and in every market they deliver "value" processors. That means in other words low income processors. So with low income and high costs, you post a loss.
Re:I'm no silicon engineer... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, those are AMD 48-core system at #1... and #2... and #3
Then there is the old performance per dollar metric where AMD has the top 7 chips on the market right now.
Intel definitely has some good chips, but aside from a small group of them, they are terrible value (rip off) and also not something they are selling a whole lot of (if you are throwing down $1000 for the CPU, you are probably in the market for a server chip with significantly better memory bandwidth than that i7-980 offers)
Dirk Meyer: Engineer who made marketing mistakes (Score:5, Informative)
"Remember, Dirk Meyer's three deadly sins were:
1) Failure to Execute: K8/Hammer/AMD64 was 18 months late, Barcelona was deliberately delayed by 9 months, original Bulldozer was scrapped and is running 22 months late.
"2) Giving the netbook market to Intel [AMD created the first netbook as a part of OLPC project] and long delays of Barcelona and Bulldozer architectures.
"3) Completely missing the perspective on handheld space - selling Imageon to Qualcomm, Xilleon to BroadCom."
There is a comment at the bottom of this poor-quality article in the Inquirer [theinquirer.net] that says Dirk Meyer "was the lead engineer who designed the Athlon, Opteron and the DEC Alpha. Let's not forget that from 1999-2006, AMD actually had better processors than Intel, and this was due to Dirk Meyer's technology."