• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

AMD CEO Dirk Meyer Was Outed Over Tablets, Smartphones

Final8y

Final8y

Final8y

Soldato
Joined
7 May 2006
Posts
12,183
Location
London, Ealing
Board thought CEO wasn't pursuing developing mobile CPUs aggressively enough

We know that Intel is feeling the pressure to deliver in the tablet and smartphone sectors, after having lagged in its response and allowing ARM CPU makers to establish a dominant position. But apparently Intel's perpetual competitor in the personal computer CPU market, Advanced Micro Devices, was also feeling the heat.

According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, AMD ousted CEO Dirk Meyer because he lacked a convincing strategy to move the company into the tablet and smartphone space.

The move had seemed unusual, as AMD was doing well with its graphics offerings, was finally ready to deliver its first "Fusion" CPU/GPUs, and is on pace to deliver chips with its latest desktop core architecture, Bulldozer, around mid-2011. Despite all of that, it was mobility that appears to have been the overruling factor when it comes to Mr. Meyer's employment.

The move took investors by surprise and they responded by beating AMD's share price downward.

Mr. Meyer had in the past seemed almost defiant, according to sources, in his opposition of entering the mobile market. During a new conference at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show, he stated, "While there are a lot of units there, the revenue is smaller."

AMD's board is composed of industry veterans -- Bruce Claflin, former CEO of network gear maker 3Com Corp.; Robert Palmer, former chief at computer maker Digital Equipment Corp.; and Craig Conway, former CEO of PeopleSoft Inc. Still one has to wonder if they're making a wise decision throwing out a CPU-savvy CEO and going for someone with less experience, but more of a lust for mobility.

Stacy Rasgon, an analyst who spoke with Chairman Claflin, comments, "They are looking for a visionary, and casting a wide net... [The next CEO will] not necessarily have semiconductor experience."

Dirk Meyer had been making an annual salary of $950,000, plus a "target" annual bonus of $1.9 million, according to Veritas Executive Compensation Consultants LLC. They estimate that his severance package was $8.55M USD in cash. An AMD spokesperson, Drew Prairie, gave a slightly higher estimate of $18M USD.

One of the candidates reportedly being considered to be Mr. Meyer's replacement is Apple's COO Tim Cook.
Click to expand...
http://www.dailytech.com/Report+AMD...ted+Over+Tablets+Smartphones/article20637.htm


AMD's Board Forgot Economics 101
Dirk Meyer left his CEO position at Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD) under murky circumstances, to say the least. The Wall Street Journal and others have unearthed some clues through their usual network of unnamed sources -- and I don't like what I see.

According to the WSJ, AMD's board of directors grew impatient with Meyer's lack of enthusiasm for mobile devices. He saw lots of demand for mobile processors, but told reporters at last week's CES gala that the margins in that space were too slim to be attractive. For that offense, he had to go -- and since the board has such immense faith in CFO Tom Seifert's ability to run the ship for a while, he left immediately.

If that's really how the deal went down, AMD needs a new board of directors. This mentality would make sense -- does make sense -- for processor market leader Intel (Nasdaq: INTC). It would be irresponsible for Intel not to expand its horizons into the exploding tablet and smartphone markets.

But it's a different story for AMD. So what if the board is concerned that desktop and notebook sales are leveling off? AMD is an underdog, and it can grow comfortably even in a shrinking market by stealing share from Intel. Meyer wanted the mobile space to mature before he made any specific moves in that direction -- a perfectly reasonable approach.

Let the market define its own boundaries, and then you can shoot at a stationary target. Intel may or may not make a mint in mobile computing, but the incumbent leader ARM Holdings (Nasdaq: ARMH) and its many partners keep moving the goalposts. Meanwhile, MIPS Technologies (Nasdaq: MIPS) could usurp ARM's hegemony before Intel and its Atom chips go anywhere.

Meyer's ouster is a knee-jerk reaction from a nervous and impatient board. If I ran a large hedge fund, I'd put together a competing slate of directors for AMD's next round of shareholder voting, in which all nine of the directors risk their tenures.

But I don't have that power. Instead, I can only helplessly watch as AMD's board kicks out one of its finest assets.
Click to expand...
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2011/01/12/amds-board-forgot-economics-101.aspx


Coup at AMD: Why was Dirk Meyer Pushed Out?
In a surprising turn of events, Dirk Meyer resigned from his post as the President and CEO of AMD, leaving Thomas Seifert [current Chief Financial Officer] to take over the role as an interim CEO.

Dirk Meyer's shift at the helm of AMD comes to a closeWe’ll skip the press release talk, since all the political correctness in the world would not prepare for a way how a high-level executive departure is handled. Just remember "Juda’s Kiss" lettering when Hector Jesus Ruiz, former CEO of AMD was ousted from GlobalFoundries - following the insider trading scandal.

Dirk’s departure wasn’t as drastic, but the decision was made only recently, as a set of circumstances caused the shift Qualcomm snapped Atheros and nVidia settled with Intel. For some odd reason, our sources told us that the combination of factors influenced the board to take action and Dirk’s shift at the AMD’s helm was up.

According to one of our sources, who was kind enough to answer the heated line, "Dirk’s departure is culmination of internal struggles between conservative and progressive currents. He lost a pair backers in BoD and that was that."

One of our sources, a former executive within the company was less than kind in his texts: "Dirk touched everything into Gold at DEC. In AMD, everything after K7 turned into ****." When asked to elaborate, we were told that "Dirk and Hector run the company to the ground by selling the family jewlery. Dirk did not believe in Cellphone business and gave everything to BroadCom and Qualcomm. We lost Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and look who is now taking all the deals. Graphzilla." [Graphzilla was the nickname for nVidia on my previous publication, The INQ].

To elaborate, "conservative current" in AMD is currently rooted in Texas and is inside the CPU side of business. "Progressives" or "Canucks" stand for ex-ATI people who started their unstoppable climb inside the corporate stable and took over many of the executive roles and started to turn AMD into an aggressive company as it once were [during the Jerry Sanders reign].

Remember, Dirk Meyer’s three deadly sins were:

1) Failure to Execute: K8/Hammer/AMD64 was 18 months late, Barcelona was deliberately delayed by 9 months, original Bulldozer was scrapped and is running 22 months late
2) Giving the netbook market to Intel [AMD created the first netbook as a part of OLPC project] and long delays of Barcelona and Bulldozer architectures.
3) Completely missing the perspective on handheld space - selling Imageon to Qualcomm, Xilleon to BroadCom

Now, when it comes to Deadly Sin #3 - selling Imageon to Qualcomm didn't just cause AMD to lose Nokia and Motorola as customers. Both companies were Spansion customers as well [NOR Flash] but that's beside the point. The key issue, according to our sources at the time was that Nokia was fighting Qualcomm in courts over patents and their silicon supplier sold the key business unit [for Nokia] to the side which they were battling in court. This also caused that Nokia lost ground on the OpenGL ES development by 14 months - an estimate given to us by a Nokia executive.

Truth to be told, we always believed people like Henri Richard and Dave Orton and more recently, Rick Bergman and Godfrey Cheng [albeit they both might be too young for the role at this point in time] were much more suited for the role of AMD’s CEO than hard-core engineers such as Dirk Meyer. After all, AMD’s "The Future is Fusion" strategy was just a marketing mantra until ex-ATI executives started to fight for the budgets and ultimately take over the Fusion strategy. In turn, they started to create an ecosystem for the architecture, poaching companies from Intel and nVidia camps, such as MotionDSP, for example.

Who is going to be the next CEO of AMD and where Dirk Meyer is going to end? We do have some hints, but cannot disclose any of them at press time. We’ll leave you to discuss, our respected readers.
Click to expand...
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2011/1/10/coup-at-amd-dirk-meyer-pushed-out.aspx
 
Last edited:
jigger said:
OMG just under 3million a year plus expenses, I feel so under paid now.

Very interesting read thanks.
Click to expand...

Yeah but thats dollars so its not really that much :p

Freddie1980 said:
Just what I thought a lack of strategy towards the mobile sector.
Click to expand...

Yes and no, I said in the other thread, real reasons and public reasons aren't necessarily the same. I wouldn't discount it, tablets/phones are worth a LOT of money, but not THAT much money.

Smartphone volume is up hugely and a hugely growing market but at some stage the upgrading for phones to post on facebook should slow down.

But the other side to it is, cpu's have insane margins, as in full power AMD/Intel cpu's do, £300 for something that costs £30 to make is silly.

Smartphones are higher volume, or will be much much higher volume but, its basically ultra competitive because there are new players every year being added, if AMD don't use an ARM based design then OS support will be non existant for a long time, and margins on a $5 chip that costs $3 to make aren't anywhere near as good, volume may be higher but volume has to be immense to make a real profit.

ITs something AMD can and maybe should get into, but its not as high profit as people think.

It seems a poor choice to fire him over, professional gpu's seems like, well its also huge margins, fairly easy for AMD to get into more heavily and they already have the gpu's designed and in production, its really just ALL software they need to do, while expensive in terms of R&D cost vs an entire range of chips, its nothing.
 
drunkenmaster said:
Yeah but thats dollars so its not really that much :p



Yes and no, I said in the other thread, real reasons and public reasons aren't necessarily the same. I wouldn't discount it, tablets/phones are worth a LOT of money, but not THAT much money.

Smartphone volume is up hugely and a hugely growing market but at some stage the upgrading for phones to post on facebook should slow down.

But the other side to it is, cpu's have insane margins, as in full power AMD/Intel cpu's do, £300 for something that costs £30 to make is silly.

Smartphones are higher volume, or will be much much higher volume but, its basically ultra competitive because there are new players every year being added, if AMD don't use an ARM based design then OS support will be non existant for a long time, and margins on a $5 chip that costs $3 to make aren't anywhere near as good, volume may be higher but volume has to be immense to make a real profit.

ITs something AMD can and maybe should get into, but its not as high profit as people think.

It seems a poor choice to fire him over, professional gpu's seems like, well its also huge margins, fairly easy for AMD to get into more heavily and they already have the gpu's designed and in production, its really just ALL software they need to do, while expensive in terms of R&D cost vs an entire range of chips, its nothing.
Click to expand...

You should run AMD Dm, you seem to think you know more than the people that do, or should i say did ;)
 
Last edited:
drunkenmaster said:
Yes and no, I said in the other thread, real reasons and public reasons aren't necessarily the same. I wouldn't discount it, tablets/phones are worth a LOT of money, but not THAT much money.

Smartphone volume is up hugely and a hugely growing market but at some stage the upgrading for phones to post on facebook should slow down.

But the other side to it is, cpu's have insane margins, as in full power AMD/Intel cpu's do, £300 for something that costs £30 to make is silly.

Smartphones are higher volume, or will be much much higher volume but, its basically ultra competitive because there are new players every year being added, if AMD don't use an ARM based design then OS support will be non existant for a long time, and margins on a $5 chip that costs $3 to make aren't anywhere near as good, volume may be higher but volume has to be immense to make a real profit.

ITs something AMD can and maybe should get into, but its not as high profit as people think.

It seems a poor choice to fire him over, professional gpu's seems like, well its also huge margins, fairly easy for AMD to get into more heavily and they already have the gpu's designed and in production, its really just ALL software they need to do, while expensive in terms of R&D cost vs an entire range of chips, its nothing.
Click to expand...

If your going to get into a market like ultra mobile and mobile then you really ought to get into to it early otherwise the barriers to market entry become very hard to overcome both financially and as Intel found with there attempted entry into the discrete graphics market with Larrabee it's technically very challenging as well (in the case system on a chip devices turning a profit would be the technical challenge).

What some of you don't seem to grasp is the world of computers is going to look very different in 10 years. The days of people going out and buying a x86 beige box or laptop as the de-facto standard will be over, tablet and mobile devices are starting to appear with HDMI ports so they can be attached to a monitor, CPU's are becoming more powerful and in a few years we will have mobile devices powerful enough to playback full HD video smoothly and carry out all of out basic computer needs. Even today non x86 devices account for 20% of the processor market and that share is set to increase and if you think I'm talking crap all I'll say is that Microsoft have official confirmed that Windows 8 won't be x86 exclusive because they know they will have start competing with Google very soon in the OS market.
 
I thought most of us knew that ultra-portability is where the mainstream market is going?

Investors will follow where ever the money goes.
 
AMD's Board Forgot Economics 101

Dirk Meyer left his CEO position at Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD) under murky circumstances, to say the least. The Wall Street Journal and others have unearthed some clues through their usual network of unnamed sources -- and I don't like what I see.

According to the WSJ, AMD's board of directors grew impatient with Meyer's lack of enthusiasm for mobile devices. He saw lots of demand for mobile processors, but told reporters at last week's CES gala that the margins in that space were too slim to be attractive. For that offense, he had to go -- and since the board has such immense faith in CFO Tom Seifert's ability to run the ship for a while, he left immediately.

If that's really how the deal went down, AMD needs a new board of directors. This mentality would make sense -- does make sense -- for processor market leader Intel (Nasdaq: INTC). It would be irresponsible for Intel not to expand its horizons into the exploding tablet and smartphone markets.

But it's a different story for AMD. So what if the board is concerned that desktop and notebook sales are leveling off? AMD is an underdog, and it can grow comfortably even in a shrinking market by stealing share from Intel. Meyer wanted the mobile space to mature before he made any specific moves in that direction -- a perfectly reasonable approach.

Let the market define its own boundaries, and then you can shoot at a stationary target. Intel may or may not make a mint in mobile computing, but the incumbent leader ARM Holdings (Nasdaq: ARMH) and its many partners keep moving the goalposts. Meanwhile, MIPS Technologies (Nasdaq: MIPS) could usurp ARM's hegemony before Intel and its Atom chips go anywhere.

Meyer's ouster is a knee-jerk reaction from a nervous and impatient board. If I ran a large hedge fund, I'd put together a competing slate of directors for AMD's next round of shareholder voting, in which all nine of the directors risk their tenures.

But I don't have that power. Instead, I can only helplessly watch as AMD's board kicks out one of its finest assets.
Click to expand...
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2011/01/12/amds-board-forgot-economics-101.aspx
 
Coup at AMD: Why was Dirk Meyer Pushed Out?

In a surprising turn of events, Dirk Meyer resigned from his post as the President and CEO of AMD, leaving Thomas Seifert [current Chief Financial Officer] to take over the role as an interim CEO.

Dirk Meyer's shift at the helm of AMD comes to a closeWe’ll skip the press release talk, since all the political correctness in the world would not prepare for a way how a high-level executive departure is handled. Just remember "Juda’s Kiss" lettering when Hector Jesus Ruiz, former CEO of AMD was ousted from GlobalFoundries - following the insider trading scandal.

Dirk’s departure wasn’t as drastic, but the decision was made only recently, as a set of circumstances caused the shift Qualcomm snapped Atheros and nVidia settled with Intel. For some odd reason, our sources told us that the combination of factors influenced the board to take action and Dirk’s shift at the AMD’s helm was up.

According to one of our sources, who was kind enough to answer the heated line, "Dirk’s departure is culmination of internal struggles between conservative and progressive currents. He lost a pair backers in BoD and that was that."

One of our sources, a former executive within the company was less than kind in his texts: "Dirk touched everything into Gold at DEC. In AMD, everything after K7 turned into ****." When asked to elaborate, we were told that "Dirk and Hector run the company to the ground by selling the family jewlery. Dirk did not believe in Cellphone business and gave everything to BroadCom and Qualcomm. We lost Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and look who is now taking all the deals. Graphzilla." [Graphzilla was the nickname for nVidia on my previous publication, The INQ].

To elaborate, "conservative current" in AMD is currently rooted in Texas and is inside the CPU side of business. "Progressives" or "Canucks" stand for ex-ATI people who started their unstoppable climb inside the corporate stable and took over many of the executive roles and started to turn AMD into an aggressive company as it once were [during the Jerry Sanders reign].

Remember, Dirk Meyer’s three deadly sins were:

1) Failure to Execute: K8/Hammer/AMD64 was 18 months late, Barcelona was deliberately delayed by 9 months, original Bulldozer was scrapped and is running 22 months late
2) Giving the netbook market to Intel [AMD created the first netbook as a part of OLPC project] and long delays of Barcelona and Bulldozer architectures.
3) Completely missing the perspective on handheld space - selling Imageon to Qualcomm, Xilleon to BroadCom

Now, when it comes to Deadly Sin #3 - selling Imageon to Qualcomm didn't just cause AMD to lose Nokia and Motorola as customers. Both companies were Spansion customers as well [NOR Flash] but that's beside the point. The key issue, according to our sources at the time was that Nokia was fighting Qualcomm in courts over patents and their silicon supplier sold the key business unit [for Nokia] to the side which they were battling in court. This also caused that Nokia lost ground on the OpenGL ES development by 14 months - an estimate given to us by a Nokia executive.

Truth to be told, we always believed people like Henri Richard and Dave Orton and more recently, Rick Bergman and Godfrey Cheng [albeit they both might be too young for the role at this point in time] were much more suited for the role of AMD’s CEO than hard-core engineers such as Dirk Meyer. After all, AMD’s "The Future is Fusion" strategy was just a marketing mantra until ex-ATI executives started to fight for the budgets and ultimately take over the Fusion strategy. In turn, they started to create an ecosystem for the architecture, poaching companies from Intel and nVidia camps, such as MotionDSP, for example.

Who is going to be the next CEO of AMD and where Dirk Meyer is going to end? We do have some hints, but cannot disclose any of them at press time. We’ll leave you to discuss, our respected readers.
Click to expand...
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2011/1/10/coup-at-amd-dirk-meyer-pushed-out.aspx
 
Stanners said:
You should run AMD Dm, you seem to think you know more than the people that do, or should i say did ;)
Click to expand...

Actually, current a8 SoCs cost around $15-$30 (many sites quote $28 for apples a4)
Also ARM chips are used in a lot more than just phones/tablets (like cars, routers etc) just look at where qualcomm was in 2003, well behind AMD. Now? Well in front...

With ARM+partners threatening the server market its going to get very interesting... even intels position could be under threat.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom