AMD CFO Thomas Seifert Resigns
Thomas Seifert is the latest and last C-level executive of the "old" AMD of the Dirk Meyer and Hector Ruiz era to leave the processor manufacturer.
Thomas Seifert is the latest and last C-level executive of the "old" AMD of the Dirk Meyer and Hector Ruiz era to leave the processor manufacturer. According to a press release, the departure happened unexpected and voluntarily.
Seifert will stay with the company until September 28. Devinder Kumar, senior vice president and corporate controller, has been appointed interim chief financial officer. He joined AMD 28 years ago.
Seifert's departure is significant as all top-level executives at AMD have been exchanged within less than one year, indicating the dramatic transformation of the company that forced some key leaders out of the company and made it difficult for the new leaders to keep others on board.
CEO Read has pulled several executives he has known from his time at IBM into AMD (CTO Mark Papermaster, SVP Lisa Su, SVP Chekib Akrout). Other new top level executives joined from Shell Oil (SVP Darrell Ford), Dell (CMO Colette LaForce), McKinsey (CSO Rajan Naik), and Nokia (SVP David Tang), which highlights the strong focus on customers. For a processor manufacturer, the representation of low level product design is surprisingly limited - only Su and Papermaster had such exposure and some may argue that there is no balance between technology and business operations representation in AMD's top decision making ranks.
However, given the extent of the restructuring of AMD's executive ranks, Read has to make this new organization work.

You got downvoted for ignorance.
AMD is still profitable, just barely.
You got downvoted for ignorance.
Intel will still need to produce new stuff if it wants to continue selling stuff. If they stopped making new CPUs beyond Haswell because AMD disappeared, 3-4 years down the road everyone would have Haswell-based PCs and nothing to upgrade to after that.
I would be more concerned about prices than progress. Without AMD, we might go back to Netburst-era pricing with the newest CPUs spanning the $200-1000 range, previous-gen stuff spanning the $150-300 range and almost nothing available for cheaper than that. (Well, it probably won't get that bad since the market for entry-level PCs is pretty much saturated and would be directly threatened by non-Wintel devices if Intel pushed their luck too far.)
Another one bites the dust
Another one bites the dust
And another one gone, and another one gone
Another one bites the dust
Hey, I'm gonna get you too
Ignorance. If Intel stopped dead in the water with Haswell and started charging $1500 for midrange CPUs, what incentive would the customer have for upgrading and buying new products? None.
I hear this argument presented all the time, and for a long time I agreed with it, but the more I think about it the more I feel it is flawed. It assumes that Intel is the only processor manufacturer, which is patently false. We have IBM with their Power processors, and the cornucopia of RISC-like designs (ARM, MIPS, etc). While Intel would have a monopoly over x86 (which they invented), those other alternatives are available.
I can already hear the shouts of "Windows software", but Windows 8 (despite its badness) does support ARM in a limited fashion, and in due course Microsoft can expand that support with future releases. Then consider the server and embedded market, where platform agnostic OSes (Linux, BSD, etc) dominate. Between all of these factors I think the "Intel will dominate the world if AMD fails" argument is overblown.
Just because they don't have the desktop on the ARM iteration? The reason they don't have a desktop on RT is because it would divide ARM and x86. Whereas software built for Windows Runtime will be WinRT (ARM) and Win8 (x86) capable. So you'll be able to download software that runs on both, from here on forward. The idea is to gradually phase out x86-only software, for cross-platform support and future proofing. Of course, down the road you could end up with a different architecture and still run x86 software via emulation.