The CEO of chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. is stepping down.
Hector Ruiz had been just the second person to lead AMD after company founder Jerry Sanders. He'll be replaced by the chip maker's No. 2 executive, Dirk Meyer.
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Member since:2008-04-15
Member since:2006-05-09
IMO, the old computers will not die overnight but they will be supplanted by a new type of machine built for super fast parallelism and super complex programs that do not fail. The x86 single and multicore multithreaded machines (together with all the legacy OSes from the last century) will eventually go the way of the dinosaurs, the buggy whip and the slide rule. AMD should let Intel hang on to those while it is forging a new market worthy of the 21st century. Intel can't do it because Intel is too married to the old stuff.
Member since:2007-11-28
Member since:2005-07-07
I honestly hope that is not your blog, because that dude over there clearly has no clue about what he's talking about. He doesn't understand the basic premise of an algorithm and takes great offense at anyone pointing it out to him.
His general hostility and disdain for anything in the academic world does him no favours. And ranting and raving about the cult of the Turing machine, while at the same time not understanding what algorithm means ... sorry but such people are not to be taken seriously.
Member since:2006-05-09
You took offence, didn't you? That proves his point about academia's thin skin, IMO. Unfortunately for the Turing machine cult and the computer science community in general, his ideas are being taken seriously by a lot of people in the industry. Why? Because he is right about parallel programming, that's why. Your point about his use of the term algorithm is lame. It is a matter of definitions. He uses the original definition. Whether or not it's the definition that you choose has little to do with his argument about parallel programming, about which you obviously have nothing interesting to say.
Member since:
2006-05-09
It is sad to read news like this. I read somewhere that Hector Ruiz said in a statement that "Dirk is a gifted leader who possesses the right skills and experience to continue driving AMD and the industry forward in new, compelling directions,". I sure hope Ruiz is right because replacing him with Meyer is just window dressing unless Meyer takes the opportunity to change the company's business model. It is time for AMD to realize that, even though it has the best engineering team in the world, parroting Intel's x86 technology is a losing proposition. Nobody can beat a behemoth like Intel playing Intel's own game in Intel's own backyard.
Now that the industry is transitioning away from sequential computing toward massive parallelism, AMD has the opportunity of a lifetime to take the bull by the horns and lead the world into the next era of computing. Intel is making a grave mistake by adopting multithreading as their parallel programming model. AMD must not make the same mistake. There is an infinitely better way to design and program multicore processors that does not involve threads at all. To find out why multithreading is not part of the future of computing, read 'Parallel Computing: Why the Future Is non-Algorithmic':
http://rebelscience.blogspot.com/2008/05/parallel-computing-why-fut...
Edited 2008-07-18 00:35 UTC