Guest post by AMD CEO, president and director Dirk Meyer has resigned, effective immediately. Senior Vice President and CFO Thomas Seifert has been appointed as interim CEO. A search for a permanent replacement is underway. In other news, Microsoft’s Bob Muglia, head of the Server and Tools business, is also leaving sometime over summer, and Microsoft is also trying to find a replacement.
Meyer, more than anyone else is responsible for AMD’s hybrid CPU/GPU processor strategy. The so-called Fusion processors are not even out the door and Meyer is kicked to the curb. This does not bode well for either AMD or the rest of the industry.
I predict that, in the new age of massive parallelism, both the CPU and the GPU are doomed. Indeed, all the crappy boomer geek computer technologies of the last century are about to come crashing like the Hindenburg. Larrabee was just the beginning. Next big failure: Fusion.
http://rebelscience.blogspot.com/2008/09/parallel-computing-both-cp…
I thought Meyer was also the brains behind Athlon (and Digital’s Alpha processors before AMD) and a general Tech Lead for many years before stepping up to the CEO role..
I doubt he was kicked and i think this is a big loss for AMD .. and in turn us!
This whole ‘effective immediately’ does sound odd though..
I just hope this is not a cue that there are problems with their forthcoming products, I’ve been holding off building a machine for a Bulldozer.
I was debating on waiting for bulldozer too but I think the 4 hyperthreaded cores (what AMD would call 8) would be comparable to 6 real cores.
Plus I don’t want to be the early adopter.
I put together a nice 6 core machine in September with these and am very pleased.
I run Linux and the onboard graphics are good enough for playing video / compiz. I may get a card in the future when I get a new monitor for photo editing but who knows.
Mobo:
ASUS M4A89GTD PRO/USB3
Proc:
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition Thuban 3.2GHz
RAM:
CORSAIR XMS3 8GB (4 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666)
Case:
COOLER MASTER RC-692-KKN2 CM690 II Advanced Black Steel ATX
What a coincidence that when selecting the components for a machine to build I chose the same motherboard, same CPU, and same memory… but a different case model from CoolerMaster, lust for the Gladiator 600.
I wouldn’t mind being an early adopter for an AMD CPU… AMD isn’t a fruity logo-manufacturer with a “don’t buy revision A hardware” motto. Plus, I still have a 7.5 year old laptop (with a still working original battery!) and an Athlon XP-M that is still doing wonders and made me view AMD in a favorable light.
AMD lost me as a customer with the TLB bug that required turning off the L3 cache (see http://forums.amd.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=12&threadid=90116 ). They mishandled the situation, by getting benchmarks in a configuration that would ultimately not be deployed, and were so keen to downplay the bug they didn’t publicize when it was fixed. So here we are, years later, and I’m not sure which chips from them I can trust, and ended up going back to Intel. A bit sad, really. Previously I was an extremely happy AMD user.