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| | AMD's Dirk Meyer appointment means no sea changes - Analysis There's still some way to go By Mike Magee @ Friday, July 18, 2008 12:00 PM
Section - PCs/Chips | | | | The appointment of Dirk Meyer as the man at the top at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) comes as no surprise. The firm has been signalling that he'll be the successor to Hector Ruiz for quite some time.
But the real question is whether Dirk Meyer being in effective charge of the ailing chip firm will turn around the company's fortunes. He's already occupied a key role at AMD for some time and so has to some extent been associated with the missteps over the last 18 months.
Meyer's background is interesting. At the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) he was a leader in developing the Alpha microprocessor - a fine design that DEC originally forecast would still be happily processing in 2025. Robert Palmer, DEC's former CEO, sits on AMD's board to this day. Some elements of this design could be seen in the design of the Opteron, which dramatically turned around AMD's fortunes. But, unhappily, AMD failed to capitalise on a clear 18 month lead it had on Intel - which was still trying to get blood out of the millstone architecture that was the Pentium 4.
Intel is at its best when its back is against the wall, and it busied itself during the 18 months fair weather for AMD by dramatically trashing its former roadmap, and eventually coming out with designs that are currently boosting its revenues and fortunes.
Hector Ruiz is an enigmatic and rather shy individual who worked at Motorola during the days of the Power PC. His character stands in sharp contrast to the flamboyant Jerry Sanders III, the CEO of AMD before Ruiz. While Sanders' history at AMD was somewhat chequered, he is a charismatic individual who threw off sound bites like a wet dog throws off rain.
Meyer is a very different kettle of fish. It's very difficult to take a photograph of him where he's smiling, but he's bright as a new pin and some might argue that rather than being put in a senior executive position, he might have been better off sitting in a darkened room with a clutch of other architectures, and designing, designing and designing.
He inherits a company which is clearly struggling, is deep in debt, and which doesn't seem to offer a very convincing roadmap. The industry remains on AMD's side - no one wants Intel to totally dominate the X86 market - here competition is very good for vendors, for distributors and for people that buy PCs too.
With Intel readying its Nehalem and other architectures, and clearly way ahead in process technology, AMD and Meyer need all the good luck that's going. X
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