One of the individuals that was responsible for laying out the company’s road map for processors of all categories, AMD’s Chief Executive Officer as well as the architect of the turnaround plan, Rory Read will be stepping down as the company’s head and will be replaced by the Lisa Su, who was employed to the company as AMD Chief Operating Officer.While Read will be resigning as CEO, he will still be remaining on board the company in an advisory capacity.
Rory Read oversaw several transitions of the company taking place, out of which one of them was a switch over from ceasing to focus primarily on Intel and its products and focusing on targeting other market segments in order to gain an upper market share of those markets, piece by piece. One of them also included targeting all segments of the graphic peripherals market, making NVIDIA the company’s second rival.
The company noted that under Read’s leadership and supervision, the processor manufacturing company had substantially reduced its operating expenses, with cash of $1 billion only to be used for expense purposes. According to Read, the maintaining of a steady amount of cash ensured that no amount of debt sprouted up the company until the 2019 time frame.
AMD’s newly appointed CEO; while having a strong background engineering; a skill that Read did not possess, does not have any experience in spearheading all the operations of a company. Lisa Su spent several years at Freescale Semiconductor and IBM, where at IBM, she responsible for the strategic direction of IBM’s silicon technologies, joint development alliances and semiconductor R&D operations. Before she got hired at IBM, she was a member of the technical staff at Texas Instruments’ Semiconductor Process and Device Center.
Since AMD road map for its desktop, laptop and graphics rendering processors is looking great, Su will unlikely be making changes to it.
