CSCS Top Right Frontpage
HPCwire

Since 1986 - Covering the Fastest Computers
in the World and the People Who Run Them

Language Flags

Visit additional Tabor Communication Publications

Datanami
Digital Manufacturing Report
HPC in the Cloud
Green Computing Report

Tabor Communications
Corporate Video

Blog: From the Editor

From the Editor | Main Blog Index

AMD Shuffles Org Chart


Late Monday, AMD announced an executive shakeup and the creation of a new centralized engineering organization. "We are accelerating AMD's transformation, reshaping the organization and bolstering our management team to lead in our x86 microprocessor and graphics businesses," said Dirk Meyer, AMD president and COO.

In fact, Mario Rivas, formerly executive VP of the Computing Solutions Group, and Michel Cadieux, formerly senior VP and chief talent officer, were accelerated right out of their jobs. Whether they left willingly is a matter of speculation. Rivas, in particular, might have been forced to walk the plank because of the Barcelona launch fiasco. To replace Cadieux, AMD promoted Allen Sockwell. According to the company, both Cadieux and Rivas resigned to "pursue other opportunities."

The fact is the struggling chipmaker has been hemorrhaging execs for almost a year. Dave Orton, head of AMD's graphics unit, left in July 2007; Henri Richard, head of sales, resigned a couple of months later in September; and CTO Phil Hester quit the company just last month.

Meanwhile Randy Allen, formerly head of the workstation and server group, will replace Rivas as the senior VP of the Computing Solutions Group. In his new role, Allen will report directly to Dirk Meyer and will be responsible for the development of the company's microprocessors and chipset platforms. The twenty-four year AMD veteran was part of the microprocessor engineering group that introduced the original Opteron and Athlon 64 processors.

The new Central Engineering organization will be run by Chekib Akrout and Jeff VerHeul. Akrout is a new hire from Freescale, while VerHeul is being shifted from his spot as VP of design engineering at AMD. The new engineering team will consolidate the development of AMD's technology and product roadmaps and will report directly to Dirk Meyer.

The reorg is inline with previously announced layoffs totaling 1,600 workers -- about 10 percent of the workforce -- scheduled to be completed by the end of the third quarter. Whether any of this helps AMD get back to profitability remains to be seen, but after suffering financial losses totaling $4.3 billion over the past six quarters, there was bound to be some bloodletting.

Posted by Michael Feldman - May 11, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time

Sponsored Links

High-Performance Computing in Action
Businesses that want to be on the cutting edge of their industries are increasingly turning to high-performance computing (HPC) solutions to handle complex compute processes and speed up their rate of innovation. Download this Executive Brief to see how businesses in energy, life sciences and entertainment put HPC solutions to work in their operations.

Accelerate your science with Seneca
One of the first HPC providers installing a 4X NVIDIA Kepler K-20 cluster. Invites you to a free evaluation on Seneca’s NVIDIA K20 Kepler cluster, pre-loaded with AMBER, NAMD, LAMMPS

Michael Feldman

Michael Feldman

Michael Feldman is the editor of HPCwire.

More Michael Feldman


Recent Comments

No Recent Blog Comments

Feature Articles

Saddling Phi for TACC’s Stampede

The Xeon Phi coprocessor might be the new kid on the high performance block, but out of all first-rate kickers of the Intel tires, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) got the first real jab with its new top ten Stampede system.We talk with the center's Karl Schultz about the challenges of programming for Phi--but more specifically, the optimization...
Read more...

"No Exascale for You!" An Interview with Berkeley Lab's Horst Simon

Although Horst Simon was named Deputy Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he maintains his strong ties to the scientific computing community as an editor of the TOP500 list and as an invited speaker at conferences.
Read more...

Supercomputing Vet Champions Quantum Cause

Supercomputing veteran, Bo Ewald, has been neck-deep in bleeding edge system development since his twelve-year stint at Cray Research back in the mid-1980s, which was followed by his tenure at large organizations like SGI and startups, including Scale Eight Corporation and Linux Networx. He has put his weight behind quantum company....
Read more...

Short Takes

Running Computational Fluid Dynamics in the Cloud

May 16, 2013 | When it comes to cloud, long distances mean unacceptably high latencies. Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany examined those latency issues of doing CFD modeling in the cloud by utilizing a common CFD and its utilization in HPC instance types including both CPU and GPU cores of Amazon EC2.
Read more...

Computing the Physics of Bubbles

May 15, 2013 | Supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have worked on important computational problems such as collapse of the atomic state, the optimization of chemical catalysts, and now modeling popping bubbles.
Read more...

Internet2 Awards Program Seeks Innovative Applications

May 10, 2013 | Program provides cash awards up to $10,000 for the best open-source end-user applications deployed on 100G network.
Read more...

Floating Funding to Exascale Island

May 09, 2013 | The Japanese government has revealed its plans to best its previous K Computer efforts with what they hope will be the first exascale system...
Read more...

HPC and the True Cost of Cloud

May 08, 2013 | For engineers looking to leverage high-performance computing, the accessibility of a cloud-based approach is a powerful draw, but there are costs that may not be readily apparent.
Read more...

Sponsored Whitepapers

Best Practices in Big Data Storage

05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.

Progress in Parallel: the Bull Parallel Programming Center

04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.

Sponsored Multimedia

SGI DMF ZeroWatt Disk Solution

In this demonstration of SGI DMF ZeroWatt disk solution, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO, discusses a function of SGI DMF software to reduce costs and power consumption in an exascale (Big Data) storage datacenter.

Cray CS300-AC Cluster Supercomputer Air Cooling Technology Video

The Cray CS300-AC cluster supercomputer offers energy efficient, air-cooled design based on modular, industry-standard platforms featuring the latest processor and network technologies and a wide range of datacenter cooling requirements.

Blogs by Topics

Blogs by Author

HPC Blogroll


Featured Events


  • June 16, 2013 - June 20, 2013
    ISC'13
    Leipzig,
    Germany

  • June 17, 2013 - June 18, 2013
    Forecast 2013
    San Francisco, CA
    United States





HPCwire Events