AMD finally has a new CEO, and as many observers expected they went for new blood from outside company. The new CEO is ex Lenovo Chief Operating Officer, Rory Read, 49 years old, and he will be leading AMD to new victories. He replaces interim CEO, Thomas Seifert, who served as interim Chief Executive Officer since January. Thomas will return to his role as Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer as we heard from insiders that he didn’t want the CEO job and that numbers make him happy.
AMD was without a CEO since January when Dirk Meyer left the company as investors didn’t like his plans for the mobile market, and investors hope that Rory can turn things around. Rory spent five years in Lenovo as President and Chief operating officer and before that he spent 23 years in IBM. He was the part of IBM when the company sold off its PC business, so maybe he can sell some other parts of AMD in order to make it more profitable.
All eyes are on AMD when it comes to the mobile market, as Windows 8 should be ready in roughly a year from now and it works on ARM chips. ARM is dramatically cheaper than x86 chips from Intel or AMD and ARM chips tend to offer excellent power efficiency.
Read will have tough job to turn things around as it usually takes a year or two in the semiconductor business to see the outcome of a big change. Chip development takes at least a year, probably a few when it comes to more complex products and new architectures, so even if AMD makes a huge turn in its direction, you won’t really see the actually products, eg. ARM based chips or lower TPD chips at least before late 2012.
Read is happy to do the CEO job as he is “very pleased to be joining AMD at this important time in its history” and he will be making a $1 million a year, with a possible $1.5 million bonus if he meets investors hopes. As long as he has a nice parachute, he will be fine and we wish him a lot of success, as 28nm ARM chips are just around corner, quad core ARMs will show up this quarter, Intel’s 32nm Atom comes this year and 22nm Ivy Bridge won’t be later than April of next year. At least the ATI part of AMD has a good chance to have the first 28nm graphics chips on the market and make some money out of it.
One thing is certain, his new job won’t be easy, especially as Dirk was well respected among many AMD enthusiast customers.