AM D Old #1

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This don't look too good for AMD.

September 27, 2002 01:06 PM

AMD's Meretsky leaves
By Tom Krazit

ADVANCED MICRO DEVICES (AMD) Fellow Wayne Meretsky has left the company, an AMD spokesman confirmed Friday. Meretsky was a driving force behind AMD's efforts to promote its forthcoming Opteron server chip.

Friday is Meretsky's "effective" last day with the company, said Morris Denton, an AMD spokesman.

"He announced a couple of weeks ago that he was leaving on his own accord, for personal reasons," he said. Meretsky may provide consulting services to AMD in the future, he said.

Meretsky spent about four years with the company, Denton said, managing the software team within AMD's Computation Products Group in the BIOS, diagnostic and driver area. His most significant contribution to the company was the creation of the plan for 64-bit tool development for the Linux community, Denton said. He previously worked for Apple Computer in its Macintosh Operating System Group, and was noted for his work on the PowerPC and PowerMac products.

"In many ways, he was an AMD evangelist. He spent a lot of time with our partners, educating them on benefits of AMD," Denton said.

AMD is trying to convince users to switch their server infrastructure from RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) chips to a low-cost setup using Linux and Opteron chips based on its Sledgehammer technology. Meretsky, who also held the title of director of software research and development, was a visible proponent of those efforts, speaking at conferences and trade shows.

The timing of Meretsky's departure might hurt AMD, as it gears up for the launch of Opteron in the first quarter of 2003. There have been no further delays or problems with the Opteron launch, since AMD announced it was delaying the launch of its Barton and Clawhammer desktop cores earlier this month, Denton said.