AMD Loses Chief Engineer Michael Goddard to Samsung

By Wolfgang Gruener
published

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.

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Wolfgang Gruener
49 Comments Comment from the forums
  • freggo
    Hope that is not the leaving of the sinking ship story.
    We need AMD, and ATI if for no other reason than to keep Intel and Nvidia on their toes.

    Reply
  • deepblue08
    *tears in eyes* RIP AMD. I just hope they get bought before they hit the can completely.
    Reply
  • sacre
    ATI separates from AMD, become independent company again

    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
    Reply
  • halcyon
    Hey, I still have a rig (that I've not turned on in months) with an AMD Phenom II x4 965BE in it. If AMD is going the way of the DoDo I'd better give it some more love. It's a good rig...I've just got too many computers.
    Reply
  • Seems like every few days I read about AMD losing more and more key personnel. Hopefully it's an inspired restructuring and not rats jumping from the sinking ship.
    Reply
  • redeemer
    Employees leaving for other opportunities wow this never happens! lol
    Reply
  • memadmax
    The death of AMD means nothing(and it prolly wouldn't happen anyways), other x86 clone makers have came and gone: Cyrix, NexGen, IBM, even Fujitsu, T.I. and others have made x86 clones...
    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...
    Reply
  • halcyon
    ^I had a Cyrix CPU-based rig that I'd built in the '90's. It was okay, but buggy as hell. Could have been that old Gigabyte mobo or that cheap computer-show RAM. You young folks don't know how much fun you missed...those were good days.
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    sacreNew intel products come out slowly and don't ahve a big difference.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.
    Reply
  • Soul_keeper
    'Another one bites the dust' should be their theme song.
    Reply