Late last week AMD put out a press release announcing “multiple organizational changes focused on strengthening the company’s senior leadership team and accelerating growth.” One notable promotion includes Mark Papermaster, who is now a executive VP and CTO of AMD. They have also hired new talent like industry veteran Sandeep Chennakeshu, as the executive VP of “Computing and Graphics responsible for the company’s high-performance PC, gaming and semi-custom businesses”.
This restructuring comes at an interesting time as pretty much right after the press release came out we got word that James Prior, Senior Product manager for AMD, an AMD employee for nearly six years, is no longer with the company. It has not been announced if James will be joining say Intel like Raja Koduri did, but it is quite weird to hear that he is no longer with the company. Just a few weeks ago we met with James at CES and he was quite excited about Zen 2 when he briefed us on it and it did not seem like we was on his way out of the company by any means. James is definitely one of the better guys in the industry and we wish him the best on his next venture.
You can see the AMD press release below…
AMD today announced multiple organizational changes focused on strengthening the company’s senior leadership team and accelerating growth.
AMD will unify all sales operations under Darren Grasby, senior vice president and chief sales officer. Grasby will now lead the global sales and go-to-market activities across all product lines, channels and regions. Previously, Grasby was responsible for worldwide sales to PC manufacturers and channel partners. — AMD has hired industry veteran Sandeep Chennakeshu into a new position as executive vice president of Computing and Graphics responsible for the company’s high-performance PC, gaming and semi-custom businesses. Chennakeshu brings extensive semiconductor experience, a deep technology understanding from a systems and software perspective, and extensive general management experience. He has spent the last 30 years serving in multiple senior engineering and executive roles at Ericsson, Freescale, Sony and Blackberry. — As the datacenter business continues to grow in importance for AMD, Forrest Norrod, senior vice president and general manager, Datacenter and Embedded Solutions Group, will now have responsibility for all AMD datacenter products across both CPUs and GPUs. — AMD is promoting Mark Papermaster to executive vice president and CTO in recognition of his leadership in driving the technology vision and roadmap execution of the company.
“2019 marks an important inflection point for AMD as we prepare to launch our next-generation high-performance 7nm products,” said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO. “I am excited to strengthen and align our leadership team around our customers and end markets to sharpen our focus on continued growth and market share gains.”
