Anderson served as a senior vice president and general manager of the Computing and Graphics Business Group and came from the network industry working for LSI, AVAGO and then made it to Intel as general manager of the AXXIA business that Intel acquired from LSI in 2014.   

Three years agom Lisa gave him a SVP and GPU role for the CPU and GPU business groups and he was running all things CPu and GPU. This is part of the reason why Raja Koduri left, as Anderson was running the business side of things for both CPU and GPU.

Of course, being a second in command at AMD was great, but chaps like Anderson always dream of the CEO position. Lattice will give him several million dollars in stock options, restricted stock units (RSUs) and Performance restricted stock units.

CEO gig is hard to pass

Anderson did a great job in getting AMD back on the popularity map with the successful launch of the Ryzen brand and portfolio, claiming a performance lead with Threadripper toys. We know people care about these Extreme edition processors such as Threadripper but apart from the marketing buzz, these things barely make a dent in financial portfolio or gain any significant sales.

Two key GPU and CPU guys have left the company and let's hope their successors can continue to drive success.

FPGA something that Lattice specializes in, will play and important role in the artificial intelligence market and of course Anderson wants to be part of that. The puzzling part is that Lattice Semi's  revenue in 2014 was $366.1 million with $48.6 million profit and 784 full time employees in 2015. This is tiny compared to  the part of the business Anderson was running for AMD, but again this is a CEO and president of the company gig that pays rather well.

Its website points out that the company wants to play in ultra low power flexible inferencing at the edge, something that the much bigger Xilinx is already doing. They can play in mobile, home or Augmented or AR environment.  

Let’s see if Anderson can help Lattice grow.