In January this year he announced he would retire from AMD after he officially joined AMD in 2007. Don’t be fooled, John was part of ATI between 1995 and 2007, as CEO of Advanced Technologies Inc and VML Ltd, a sales company that was responsible for the Northern European market. This sales machine managed to generate annual sales of around $200m annual sales and yes, it did represent both Nvidia and ATI; along with Cyberlink, Powerchip Semiconductors, Vanguard Corporation and others.

In 2007 John joined AMD VP Worldwide Graphics and Chipset Sales and over the years he became a Senior Vice President and Chief Sales Officer at AMD. His last job was Senior Vice President and General Manager at AMD, responsible for AMD’s $3bn+ processor (CPU), discrete graphics and workstation graphics businesses. One can say that he did his best under the circumstances during his time at AMD, and at one point he was even named turnaround exec of the year. He did a lot to advance CPU and graphics sales and he can do great job at pushing some good products. 

John took some time off, but we just got a confirmation that this capable salesman and strategist joined Dell as Global VP of Sales and Strategy. He was ex AMD CEO Rory Read's wingman, so we were not surprised to see John join Dell. They both joined different parts of the company, but it is still not surprising that they ended up in the same outfit.

Michael Dell will obviously use his services, but we still don’t know who John will report to. We wish him well and we are happy to see him sticking around in our industry.