AMD is about to announce that Pat Patla, GM and Corp VP Server Products is leaving the company. His last day at AMD is Friday and he tendered his resignation earlier this week.

It is not clear if this move was forced by AMD’s new management, or if Pat wanted to move on in search of new opportunities. Most probably, it was a little bit of both.

Pat has been with AMD since March 2003 and as of 2008 he worked as general VP of the company’s Opteron division. At its heyday, prior to 2005 and the costly acquisition of ATI, AMD’s Opteron division was doing quite well. Howevwe, those days are long gone.

Pat could do little to turn things around since he took the helm on some important products, including the latest Bulldozer processors. Bulldozer was already delayed for quite some time, and once it came years later, it had to compete against superior parts from Intel.
 
AMD will take some time until the new architecture so it can really push Intel in the high end, but in the meantime, the company will have to stick with Bulldozer derived processors.