AMD server guru leaving the company. How he was touting ARM servers a few week back. ------------------------------- AMD Makes General Manager Su COO; Surprise Departure of Server Guru Feldman By Tiernan Ray
Readers of my opus earlier this week on Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) earlier this week will be interested to know that the company today announced a shake-up of its organizational structure, with its former general manager for global business units, Lisa Su, becoming chief operating officer, replacing Robert Rivet, and with the consolidation of its “semi-custom” chip business unit into a broader “enterprise, embedded, and semi-custom business group.”
AMD shares are unchanged currently at $4.29.
Su will be the “acting lead” for that business unit, and another unit, “computing and graphics,” focusing on client computing chips, will report to her. Su will report to CEO Rory Read.
AMD said the move was designed “to create a singular, market-focused organization responsible for all aspects of product strategy, product execution, sales and operations.” The latter is headed by AMD’s head of sales, John Byrne.
Dylan McGrath at EE Times has an interesting write-up on the matter with quotes from a couple of analysts. Those individuals speculate that the company had become impatient with server chip sales declines under former COO Rivet and strategy veep Marty Seyer. Both individuals are leaving AMD, McGrath reports.
Raymond James’s Hans Mosesmann, who has an Outperform rating on AMD stock, this afternoon writes that the nomination of Su to the COO spot was “no surprise,” nor that of Byne.
However, in addition to what was announced in the release, notes Mosesmann, Andrew Feldman, who had been the brains behind the company’s server chip strategy since his startup, Seamicro, was acquired in 2012, is leaving the company.
Mosesmann thinks perhaps AMD is in a difficult spot in the server market being late to the party in developing its own custom “CPU” core for its parts, while competitors such as Cavium (CAVM) and Applied Micro Circuits (AMCC) have already rolled their own versions of ARM Holdings (ARMH) technology for server chips:
This position on paper [head of enterprise, embedded, semi-custom] should have gone to SeaMicro’s former CEO and ARM server evangelist Andrew Feldman. As such, this is a curious situation. We did confirm this morning that Mr. Feldman will be leaving AMD tomorrow (other SeaMicro founders will be staying). We would note that Mr. Feldman is known to be a passionate entrepreneur, so maybe a GM role was not part of his vision. Nonetheless, the timing is what it is, and there is no GM for this strategic unit at the moment. We speculate that AMD’s move to take an “architectural” ARM license just a month ago (meaning product hits the market in about 2 years from now) may have been a tactical mistake and perhaps a missed window of opportunity. AMD’s current ARM-based Seattle processor uses mobile off-the-shelf Cortex A57, which we view may be hard-pressed to compete against custom ARM solutions from Applied Micro Circuits (X-Gene shipping this summer), and Cavium (ThunderX sampling in 4Q14).
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