AMD Loses Chief Engineer Michael Goddard to Samsung
The exodus of key employees at AMD continues.
The next in line is Michael Goddard, who was corporate vice president of product design and chief engineer at the company until December. Goddard joined AMD in 1988 and is now employed by Samsung and holds the position of vice president and chief system architect.
Goddard reportedly was close with former AMD CEO Dirk Meyer, who was let go in 2011 and the first of more than 20 executives that have left AMD so far. Other high profile executives that departed AMD include CFO Thomas Seifert, CMO Nigel Dessau, COO Bob Rivet, CSO Emilio Ghilardi, graphics CTO Eric Demers, SVP Marty Seyer, corporate VP David Wang, chief engineer Jim Mergard, corporate VP Pat Moorhead, GM Rick Bergman, and GM Chris Cloran.
Media reports suggest that Goddard was not fired, but left AMD voluntarily to accept the position with Samsung, which will compete with AMD in the ARM server SoC market.

We need AMD, and ATI if for no other reason than to keep Intel and Nvidia on their toes.
If AMD fails it will likely sell off its CPU assets and just become a graphics only company. I think there is an effort at AMD to get new blood in there and to maybe get the salaries down at the same time. Someone there since 1988 probably had a pretty fat salary.
Unless the company totally folds, a bankruptcy is not the same as it is for an individual. Think of GM, they didn't totally go out, the bankruptcy allowed them to restructure their debt and change the union contracts so they could have a path to profitability. But unlike GM, AMD wouldn't have the government in the way.
I've said many times, AMD need to advertise! I have never seen an AMD CPU commercial, even when they had better products. Intel is a household name, AMD is considered an off-brand by many. Can't afford Intel, get AMD, type of thing. If they can do some catching up and succeed in new markets, they desperately need to advertise and let people know who they are.
We need AMD, and ATI if for no other reason than to keep Intel and Nvidia on their toes.
AMD collapses, sells off everything, Intel becomes bigger.
Intel owns entire CPU market, f**ks with prices so much, doesn't put as much money into R&D
New intel products come out slowly and don't ahve a big difference.
Intel says "Well? Who the hell else you going to use? Tough s**t"
nVidia slowly makes better and better CPU's in their own quiet corner
Eventually released a new advanced CPU/GPU,
nVidia rises, cooks me supper and I go to bed.
Filet mignon
You AMD iFanboys that are preaching that we are screwed if AMD dies haven't a clue how the CPU market works, or are old enough to remember the early days...
Anyways, more than likely, AMD will prolly downsize to the size of Cyrix and maintain a low profile for a while, prolly switch over to fab'ing intels' chips till they figure out what to do... Either way, they will still be around, even if it's just a dummy Fab company making chips for others...
There hasn't been a major performance jump on Intel's (nor AMD's) since when Intel decided to backpedal on Netburst.
The bulk of the annual ~60%/year performance growth that went on until about eight years ago was attributable to clock speeds and that large chunk of annual increase died when CPUs hit the ~4GHz brick wall.
If AMD fails it will likely sell off its CPU assets and just become a graphics only company. I think there is an effort at AMD to get new blood in there and to maybe get the salaries down at the same time. Someone there since 1988 probably had a pretty fat salary.
Unless the company totally folds, a bankruptcy is not the same as it is for an individual. Think of GM, they didn't totally go out, the bankruptcy allowed them to restructure their debt and change the union contracts so they could have a path to profitability. But unlike GM, AMD wouldn't have the government in the way.
I've said many times, AMD need to advertise! I have never seen an AMD CPU commercial, even when they had better products. Intel is a household name, AMD is considered an off-brand by many. Can't afford Intel, get AMD, type of thing. If they can do some catching up and succeed in new markets, they desperately need to advertise and let people know who they are.
AMD is on the right path; they are no longer trying to compete with Intel (at least in the long-term). They are diversifying the product portfolio putting more emphasis on embedded, and less on traditional CPUs.
The PC is "dead" - at least for now. AMD can't compete with Intel in the PC market. If OEMs and consumers weren't smart enough to use AMD in the past, maybe they will be happy paying 3X as much for Intel CPUs in the future. Consumers don't give a crap about that last 10-15% of performance that Intel offers yet OEMs continue to use more expensive Intel chips. It's almost like Intel was paying them to use their chips; that would never happen right?
I completely agree with SteelCity1981. It's rebuild time. Hopefully they can survive 2013 to get the plan off the ground.
The x86 instruction set license AMD got from Intel is non-transferable. This means the only companies AMD can sell its CPU assets to are companies that either already own a similar license or are capable of obtaining one.
None of the x86 license holders I can think of have the budget or interest in x86 computing to take a chance on picking up AMD's x86 CPU business. On the other hand, quite a few may be interested in the GPU side of things since they are actually profitable and a key asset to meet the explosive growth in smartphone/tablet SoC demand.
Should the worst happen, the GPU assets will definitely survive but the CPU ones may be a long shot.
I hope the SEC tracks his share portfolio accordingly.
The old Server VP told me he was on a roll.
This is what happens when an IP company (remember most of their Fab and related assets are now gone to GF) has a bean counter placed at the top during troubled times ... the board forgets that without constantly researching new IP the company is nothing ... headed down a hole.
He is masterming and If someone can save AMD, he can with his marvelous ideas.
Anyways, maybe that's why Steamroller is pushed back, becouse he will desing it from the groud up.
P.S. happy 8320 owner here, clocked to 4.5ghz. Works like a charm.
What a completely pointless comment. Much like this one.