Leaner and meaner?
Processor company AMD has unveiled the first reorganisation of its executive structure since the completion of the spin-off of its manufacturing operations.
The biggest change concerns a newly created ‘products group'. This is designed to rationalise what AMD considers to be one of its key USPs: the grouping of CPU, chipset and GPU into a single platform. In effect, to complete the merger of AMD and ATI.
The two most senior product guys at AMD were Randy Allen on the CPU side and Rick Bergman (ex ATI, pictured) on the graphics side. Well, Allen's history now and Bergman is heading up the product group. This could be a purely political thing or it could be an indication that AMD is putting greater emphasis on the graphics side of things in its future product strategy.
You can see why it might - both AMD's discrete and integrated graphics offerings are competing well at a time when Intel is really executing on the CPU side of things. The problem is, a lot of the credit for these good GPUs has to go to former graphics CTO Bob Drebin, who has left to join Apple and Raja Koduri, also a former CTO, who is rumoured to be joining him.
So if AMD is going to put greater emphasis on graphics, it will have to so without two of its principal technologists on that front.
