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ATI's ex-CEO, Dave Orton, resigns. A sign of things to come?

by Tarinder Sandhu on 10 July 2007, 15:11

Tags: ATi Technologies (NYSE:AMD)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qajcj

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Dave Orton, ex-President and CEO of ATI, has decided that enough is enough at the much-beleaguered 'new' AMD and tendered his resignation, AMD has announced.



As one of the newly-titled AMD VPs, Orton's remit included overseeing strategy and operational activities for the company's new graphics arm.

We can only but surmise that the protracted and messy merger, near-everlasting delays to R600, relatively mediocre performance when compared to the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra, and lukewarm reception to the company's low-to-midrange Radeon HD 2000 series, has pushed Dave O. over the edge.

Adrian Hartog and Rick Bergman step up to fill VP Dave's big shoes, which will leave the building at the end of the month.

A case of jumping ship when the only way is down, or is it more of a belated spring clean of the old ATI by avuncular Hector and co? We'd love to hear your thoughts.

Just don't mention Q1 losses! Or do.

HEXUS Links

Cast your minds back to around the time we launched HEXUS.tv and you may recall an interview we did with the man himself. Definitely very interesting retrospective viewing, we'd say.

HEXUS Forums :: 7 Comments

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Posted by DeSean - Tue 10 Jul 2007 15:21
maybe good news in the long run, but bad news in that it is kind of the icing on the cake for Intel and Nvidia in particular. It basically demonstates that despite the brave face, ATi has been very, very bad recently.

The ATi chipsets are average (or at least the boards using them have been), the recent graphics releases by the company have been underwhelming at best. How many people will buy one or even two HD2900s when they use that much power and are often outclassed by the competition?

It makes me sad and a bit annoyed, because we desperately need AMD/ATi in order to keep prices low and innovation high. I for one will be taking advantage of this when Intel slashes its quad core prices at the end of this month! By the looks of it, AMD's Phenom will also underperform… leaving Intel to clobber them on Price/Performance.
Posted by kapowaz - Tue 10 Jul 2007 17:51
It's remarkable how quickly things can change. Last time I built a PC from scratch for myself (about 18 months ago) ATI and AMD ruled both the graphics and CPU high end, and Intel looked a dead duck CPU-wise (Nvidia not quite so bad). Now the roles are totally reversed and we've got a one-horse race again. Very disappointing, because competition is what pushes this industry forwards (you all remember Nvidia's complacency around 2003?).
Posted by Steve - Tue 10 Jul 2007 21:56
It's interesting to now watch his interview with HEXUS.tv, from back when the merger was fresh news!
Posted by timlm - Thu 12 Jul 2007 15:11
I am a recent business school grad and just studied the effects of acquisitions and mergers, especially related to top management. Often times the management from the acquired company is placed in executive positions to placate investors and customers, but the grand plan is ultiamtely to replace them. The fact that this anouncement comes almost exactly 6 months after the actual acquisition lends credence to this theory.

Most often it is difficult to resolve differences in company cultures and policies, from management execs down to the most basic front-line positions. It is not uncommon to see many of the acquired company's employees leave, generally on amicable terms with nice severance packages. The CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, and COOs get the most attention, but the VPs and middle management can often feel the squeeze as well. I would guess that this is more preplanned than anything else. The ATI managment was left in place to complete their current projects, but with those projects out the door (and most especially with their rather dismal failure) it is time for AMD's managment team to step up and take the new AMD/ATI on the course to reach their strategic vision. I would be more surprised to see the ATI engineers and CSs leave, since AMD needs their experience and intellectual capital to realize the most value out of this merger.

I wish Orton the best and I'm sure he will do well wherever he ends up. I am more excited to see what AMD can accomplish with their integration strategies outlined in their roadmap now that their management team is hopefully unified and all on the same page. (link to AMD roadmap missing due to my limited post count).
Posted by Zak33 - Fri 13 Jul 2007 08:43
nicely worded timlm…and welcome :)

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