Opinion: What Does AMD's New CEO Need to Fix?
AMD's new leader has some work to do.
CEO changes at AMD have always had some drama associated with them, and they have always been something special. Co-founder Jerry Sanders, for example, stayed with AMD for 32 years until he handed over the company to his apprentice, Hector Ruiz, in 2002. Ruiz’s fate was closely tied to the acquisition of ATI in 2006, which almost sunk AMD financially in 2007. Ruiz was instrumental in spinning off the manufacturing arm in 2008, which gave him an opportunity to leave AMD with grace at a time when he was not the most popular employee there.
Dirk Meyer succeeded Ruiz in July 2008 but was terminated in January of this year amid speculation that he clashed with the Board of Directors concerning what direction the company should take. It was rumored that Bruce Claflin, who previously was CEO of 3Com from 2001 to 2006 then became AMD’s chairman in 2009, was unhappy with Meyer’s slow reaction to the tablet market. Therefore, the Board of Directors felt that a new face would be needed to proceed in that direction.
Given Meyer’s background, the decision was surprising. He knew AMD inside and out and was well-respected within the company. Hector Ruiz was instrumental in bringing Meyer to leadership in various executive roles. In addition, Meyer had the engineering credentials for this job. He was the executive lead behind the Athlon design that had pushed AMD through its greatest business phase yet. The decision to get rid of Meyer did not only indicate that there must have been a big clash, but that AMD had surely lined up a terrific replacement.
I felt that AMD needed a celebrity CEO with huge credentials who fit the paycheck AMD traditionally gives to its CEOs. In the end, you can’t find qualified CEOs for a CPU company on every street corner. At one point, a well-informed source told me that AMD was interested in Pat Gelsinger, a long-term Intel executive who was the design lead for the 486 CPU at Intel – and was one of the very few Intel employees who were mentored personally by Intel co-founder Andy Grove. Gelsinger told me in 2004 that he dreams of becoming Intel’s CEO, which has not worked out so far as he is currently president and COO at EMC. A CEO role at AMD may have killed that Intel dream for him forever. However, another rumor states that AMD looked at Qualcomm and Freescale for potential candidates, which did not work out well either. Last week, AMD said that Rory Read is the company’s new CEO. Rory who?
I have been a tech journalist for 17 years, but Mr. Read is not someone with whom I am familiar, and there is a good chance that you may not know him either. AMD’s conference call was not exactly enlightening regarding Mr. Read’s credentials, so I have spent some time reading about him. Before accepting the CEO position at AMD, he was president and COO at Lenovo. Before Lenovo and before 2006, he worked for 23 years at IBM. Wikipedia tells us that he drove Lenovo’s tablet and smartphone strategy … aha! I am glad that I discovered this note, as it was not mentioned during AMD’s call.
I still think that the firing of Meyer was rather odd. AMD is currently profitable, based on products envisioned by Ruiz and Meyer. The product lineup is solid, even if the company isn’t competing in the CPU market above $150, and there is no explicit smartphone / tablet product at this time. However, AMD is taking the market share from Intel with some products, showing a confidence that I haven’t seen in at least six years. Intel doesn’t have a strong tablet contender either, and AMD told me earlier this year that the current product lineup would allow the release of a tablet processor later this year. Conceivably, AMD’s current lineup is much stronger than it has been in five years.
AMD has not answered the exact need for a new CEO so far, and Claflin still evades direct questions about why Meyer was fired and now why Read was hired. During the CEO appointment call with the press and analysts, Claflin said that the replacement was necessary to increase shareholder value. He noted that he expects from AMD’s CEO that the company will expand in the markets in which it currently competes and will improve execution. He also anticipates new strategies for new opportunities. I would have loved to hear what opportunities those could be, but all I heard from AMD’s interim-CEO, Thomas Seifert, Claflin, and the new CEO, was how great the synergies are, how much they agree on their visions, and how excited they are about the opportunity for AMD. If you were to interpret this as one big love fest, you’d be right.
Commenting on AMD’s opportunity, it puzzled me that Read focused almost entirely on the current APU lineup and AMD’s sales success in the past quarters as well as the coming server opportunity. Did he talk about upcoming ultramobile processors? Nope. There was a question that targeted a possible ARM partnership that was quickly shot down by Read, which could hint that there is something in the works – or not. With Read’s background, which I now know is especially strong in tablets and smartphones, I would have expected a bit more detail relating to the opportunity for AMD mobile products, but there was zero information. Claflin highlighted the fact that Read is qualified for the job when he was a buyer of AMD products at Lenovo, because he represented the customer voice. But even in this case, Read could have commented on a possible gap and an opportunity for strategic expansion – since it really isn’t a big secret that Claflin apparently wants many more mobile products.
I can’t quite say that I have ever been short of questions when I attended such a conference call. From a journalist’s perspective, it is always exciting to get a first impression from a new key executive in this industry and see where a company might be going. This was one of the occasions where I had no idea where I would even begin to ask questions, as we are missing the foundation as to why Meyer had to go and why Read is more qualified to do a better job than Meyer. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t feel sorry for Meyer; I just don’t quite understand the reasoning. Sanders’ departure made sense and Ruiz’s resignation made even more. Meyer’s firing does not. I believe that Claflin and Seifert have introduced quite a bit of uncertainty to AMD’s roadmap. They told investors that they will change something, but have not yet said exactly what, how, or when it will be changed.
During the call, Read told participants that he has joined AMD “to win” and that “he can’t wait to get started.” For $1 million a year, I guess AMD shareholders would agree with that. In the end, AMD has never had a more expensive CEO (as far as base salary is concerned) than Read. That fact alone puts tremendous pressure on Read and Claflin. Whatever they come up with, they don’t have any room for failure.
- How to Hack Together a TV Celebrity Silencer
- HP Pavilion DM1 Now Just $399, Sports AMD E-series
- AMD Shipping Desktop A4-3300, A4-3400 APUs
- EA Studies WoW While Prepping SW: TOR Launch
- OCZ joins the mSATA SSD Battlefield
- Deals Sept 8: 27" Planar 1080p 2ms LCD Monitor $229
- MSI Calls Out Gigabyte for "Not True PCIe 3.0"
- How Google is Turning Chrome Into a Gaming Platform
- Microsoft Unveiling Windows 8 on Tablet Next Week
- IBM Has Plans for a 100 PFlop Supercomputer
- Deals for September 9: 15.6" Dell Inspiron Core i5 $499
- Blizzard: Six "Proven Property" Titles by 2014
- ADATA Doubles Down on SATA III With Value SSD
- Hacker Claiming He Can Exploit Windows Update
- Angelbird Now Shipping SSD RAID Card for 800 MB/s
- Opinion: What Microsoft Must Accomplish in IE10
- Windows 8 to Support Native ISO and VHD Mounting
- Deals Sept 12: Deus Ex Human Revolution (Console) $35
Two major things that needs to be adressed:
1. Time to market with new products
2. Performance competitive products
Marketing or lack of marketing. AMD really needs to grow their brand specially now that they have fusion parts in the low end where consumers will choose by brand more often than not. They need to come up with something catchy like Intel Inside...ding..ding...diing.
Well, if the board wanted more of a focus on tablets and smartphones, perhaps that's what they got. Maybe they're trying to tweak, chop, and hack an APU for that market, specifically to compete with Tegra.
While I sort of agree with pbrigido on #1, something can only be released when it's ready, otherwise it's a big fail. That may mean a tighter rein on the hype machine. I think people would rather have a firm date in the distance than a "next quarter" or "next month" date that keeps getting pushed back. As much as I've been anticipating Bulldozer, I sometimes think I should call it Bullpooper instead for these constant delays.
On #2, I think AMD has shown that the APU concept works well, and IS competitive from an overall system perspective. Brought to the tablet market, I think it will do well. As to owning the top spot in CPU performance, I don't think that matters to a big enough piece of the market.
While there are issues at AMD that need to be addressed, this story reads like sour grapes to me. It's as if some journalists are PO'ed that AMD did not explain the firing of Meyer and the journos know little about Read, so they are frustrated and want to tactfully bad mouth AMD until AMD tells them what they want to know.
Yes AMD most definitely needs to improve execution. By doing so they will also become competitive technically or once again surpass Intel in CPU performance.
What enthusiasts need to understand is that the mass market segments are what make a company profitable, not the latest bleeding edge CPUs. Thus a relatively small company like AMD (compared to a competitor like Intel), must focus it's resources on getting and maintaining the mass markets while still trying to offer enthusiasts some candy.
Read seems to have the marketing and management experience to improve the situation at AMD. You can't make the effective changes that need to be made, overnight. It will take time, like 2-5 years, not months. With AMD finally releasing Bulldozer based chips for all market segments, things should improve financially which gives AMD an opportunity to accelerate new product development and production. I see a bright future for AMD and consumers but with the horrible economic conditions in the U.S. and Europe the road will be bumpy for the next 3 years or more IMO.
The one thing intel will always have over AMD, intel chipsets.
Well of course there isn't... AMD is essentially a chip-maker, not a full-scale product manufacturer. Their development focuses on individual processing components found inside full-scale products, not the product itself. Their primary competition is with Intel (and ARM, to some extent), which is also a chip-maker, and also not a full-scale product manufacturer.
AMD does not (currently) compete directly with the likes of Samsung and Apple, who are full-scale product manufacturers. If they were to go down that route, then they may actually find themselves fighting product wars on far too many fronts. We're all familiar with the expression, "spreading oneself too thin." I worry that should AMD take on full-scale product development endeavors, it could very well be their undoing.
I don't feel AMD needs to branch out and expand their products. Instead, they need to kick their current product R&D into high-gear and start competing at the top-tier again.
Fire AMD marketing team and start anew...
Figure out what to do about GF..
He needs to keep the company on time.
working more on software side of the development process, something competitor to nvidia physx and CUDA. also on processor's instruction set.
Don't fix anything. AMD is on the right track finally. They got smart and moved to other markets and stopped trying to compete with Intel in the dying enthusiest desktop market.
They shipped 15million APU's in the 2nd quarter alone and released 16core quad channel bulldozers for the server market already.
Way to go AMD.
He needs to show us some bulldozer benchmarks
They have fixed it, they have Fusion.
What they need is a fusion tablet that wins price/performance wise and wins on features... coming next year I bet.
GeekApproved prety much said what I was going to say. AMD is no longer the juggernaut they once were. AMD has realized that the enthusiast market is essentially a wash and is concentrating on undercutting Intel on the lower-end cores. They simply have less money for R&D and cannot keep up with Intel so it makes sense.
Whether they are milking the current tech for what it's worth or actually trying to push forward will remain to be seen. AMD needs to work on cutting deals with all the big-name laptop and desktop manufacturers to get cores in those products, and corner Intel in the lower end market to stay relevant. Although this is bad for gamers and enthusiasts (Less pressure on intel to make newer, better cores) it doesn't seem to matter as pretty much every game made nowadays is made to order for 5 year old ecksbawks and pee ess three hardware.
Anybody who says anything other than this obviously isn't thinking from AMD's point of view. They don't need to have the biggest and best, rip-roarinest data-munching processor, they just need cash, that's what makes the world go 'round after all.
And as far as the people who are saying "keep them on time" would you rather AMD dumped too much money into R&D for the new cores and had to declare bankruptcy or close up shop because of it? They can't afford to push out new cores on a tick-tock yearly schedule like Intel.
If there's one thing they need their CEO needs to fix, it's that awful stock photo of him grinning like an idiot with that dorky combover.
They need to get their name out their in the public arena. AMD needs exposure. It seems that everytime you turn on the damn boob tube you hear that annoying but memorable "bum bum, bum bummmmmm" tune of intels.
they need to reduce their prices. AMD seems to ignore the the price vs performance of their competitors and price slower parts similarly to faster competitor parts.
Don't sell a CPU for $200 if that same $200 can get me a cpu thats nearly 30% faster from intel.
AMD has done good with lowering prices for their mid range chips where you get better price to performance than from intel, but but from their higher end parts, they need too significantly bring down the prices.
The cost of making a CPU is very low, generally $5-10, and while R&D is expensive, if you want to get a better return on investment, is better to sell a CPU at $120 instead of $200 and sell 10 times as many CPU's
Remember, with CPU's, the manufacturing is cheap, the R&D is expensive.
AMD's failure is doe to them not pricing within their performance bracket. Also, while AMD may not have the fastest chips, in the area where most people buy CPU's are and where most prebuilt systems CPU's are, AMD has a wide range of equivalent CPU's for less money. The problem here is that inconsistent pricing makes it a confusing investment as you are unsure if it would be worth investing in a system where a future upgrade may cause you to get a bad price to performance ratio.
He can find AMD a better, smarter CEO who doesn't use tired cliches like "I want AMD to become a predator."
I Use AMD at home and Intel at work (no choice) my AMD system at home is a Athlon X2 64 3800+, my work is a Intel E8400. Both are Dual Core, the Intel uses faster ram (DDR2 vs DDR), and is 3.0Ghz to my AMD's 2.0Ghz, and i still feel that i am getting the same performance from both. I can't see a reason to favor Intel when in my "real world use" it's not faster.
AMD has my loyalty because Intel is the sneaky greedy mocher in the room.
AMD has the best price per performance.
Intel has the best "highest price".
Start working on system-on--chip designs for mobile devices, that is what the board wants, right?
I Use AMD at home and Intel at work (no choice) my AMD system at home is a Athlon X2 64 3800+, my work is a Intel E8400. Both are Dual Core, the Intel uses faster ram (DDR2 vs DDR), and is 3.0Ghz to my AMD's 2.0Ghz, and i still feel that i am getting the same performance from both. I can't see a reason to favor Intel when in my "real world use" it's not faster.AMD has my loyalty because Intel is the sneaky greedy mocher in the room.AMD has the best price per performance. Intel has the best "highest price".
Your fanboy is showing..lol
AMD needs to shit can it's R&D department.
Simple..
1) Create a winning desktop CPU! It must be faster than Intels!
2) Sell it for slightly less than Intels top end CPU!
3) ?
4) Profit!
@ coldmast, it's not fair to compare an athlon X2 64 3800+ to an E8400 wolfdale CPU (which even beats some tri/quad core CPUs in benchmarks).
While diversity is very good, it would be nice if they focus alot more on performance as well. For the average user, they are in a decent position. But for "gamers" they are NOT even an option compared to intel. There's just too much of a difference between the two.
Sorry I meant to write @ kriswone
Don't fix anything. AMD is on the right track finally. They got smart and moved to other markets and stopped trying to compete with Intel in the dying enthusiest desktop market.They shipped 15million APU's in the 2nd quarter alone and released 16core quad channel bulldozers for the server market already.Way to go AMD.
It's kinda funny how one comment can be copied and pasted from news article to news article and still be relevant to each lol...
Anyway... I want to see more work on the advertising. They have great looking products like the black/red radeons, etc. They need to really field out the proper ad agency and hit it gas pedal to the floorboard and keep it straight. They could really gain broad appeal in all areas from budget to high-end with the right strategy.
his face is like a rotten potato
While I was having a smoke... hook up with a well respected documentary filmmaker and really, I mean really, open up the doors and show the world what was once the deepest darkest industry secrets... It'd be revolutionary. Make it also very people and family oriented. Really put a spotlight on some of the personalities over at AMD... the common man, the mashed potatoes and gravy, and go for that AMD is *more* American than Intel. Leave out any references to Malaysia lol...
While diversity is very good, it would be nice if they focus alot more on performance as well. For the average user, they are in a decent position. But for "gamers" they are NOT even an option compared to intel. There's just too much of a difference between the two.
Sounds like a basic user. 20 seconds faster at a simple task is not worth the price difference is what I believe he is saying.
Drop the Sempron asnd Athlon names. There is no need for these cpus to be on the next platform. Don't make the same mistake intel is doing by creating a cluster fudge of processors that don't need to be there anymore like the Celeron and Pentium line.
All amd need right now is exposure, and a hard future focus on mobile platforms from a make the investors money standpoint. Nothing more.
Bulldozer is nice but its not going to sell truckloads of them when their lowest end Bd part ends up in $1000+oem pcs. People are going for laptops, netbooks and tablets to a lesser extent. Amd needs to mAke a part at the price of an atom that performs like a core 2. Once they do that everything else is going to fall in place.
When I was in retail, back in the Athlon days, it was simple to say "hey, a word document or a web page can only open so fast regardless.." A lot easier from that perspective.
I think that guy is still way off as far as stating they're not an option for gaming. Is 1080p the most widely used resolution yet? If not, it will be soon and for a long time to come. Anybody with a dual core chip as much as 5 years old can achieve that with the right gpu.
What many enthusiasts do not understand is business... Advertising is great but 95% of consumers don't know or care what brand of CPU is in a store bought PC. All they care about is price and perceived value. AMD knows this and that is why they sold 12 million Llano APUs in a few months - FAR more than they expected. The way they achieved this excellent sales volume was because they got 150 new wins from VENDORS who build PCs for the consumer market. They showed the VENDORS what was coming with Llano laptop APUs, supported their development of the Llano platform and then when they started shipping Llano the VENDORS were all geared up and shipped these out to customers looking for a great user experience for a low price. AMD didn't even advertise Llano because the VENDORS are the ones who deliver to the mass markets.
Intel can afford to piss away hundreds of millions on TV ads and buy server sales and ultrabook sales with bribe money. AMD can't compete on ad or marketing dollars so they instead deliver what customers want. In the server market that is low power consumption, long term platform stability/upgrade options and good performance. Welcome to Opteron 6200/4200!
So Llano is a hit, Bulldozer based Opteron 6200's/4200's are selling faster than AMD can produce them with Cray and other super computer folks using them to upgrade existing computers and in new builds. Cray supposedly got the first 10,000 AMD Bulldozer based Opterons and is waiting for more. Next when AMD releases Zambezi they won't be able to produce them fast enough to meet demand. All of this is good news for consumers and a watershed moment for AMD. Once the Zambezi and other Bulldozer iteration pipeline is open AMD will be shipping Bulldozer based CPUs as fast as they can produce them.
Read's job will be to manage this sudden sales/production growth, expedite production of the next several waves of Bulldozer upgrades, define product for 2015 and beyond, refine the ramp of new product so it is on time or early, continue to build VENDOR relations now that Intel has been convicted of bribery, blackmail, and other illegal strongarm tactics and advance the APU advantage that AMD has over Intel in all market segments.
AMD has existed for more than 35 years by providing what consumers want at a fair price. They don't need to be bigger than Intel or have more sales to deliver the best value/performance proposition. They need to evolve not make radical changes.