Today we got news that Doug Stoakley, Nvidia's Senior Director of Worldwide Sales for Tegra and Mobile would be changing his hat from the green team to the red team. While there is no official confirmation of such a move just yet, the belief is that everything has already been said and done and that he will be starting his new role at AMD as soon as next week. At AMD, Doug Stoakley will be reponsible for worldwide GPU sales and will hopefully help AMD return to profitability after posting a loss of $74 million.
Looking at Doug's own track record, you can see that Nvidia has slowly been picking up steam on their Tegra 4 mobile SoC and that they are slowly picking up more and more design wins as we noted in our SHIELD story. Initially, Nvidia's design wins were solely Toshiba's tablet and ZTE's Phone and possibly a tablet. Now their product portfolio has expanded to HP's SlateBook X2 and ASUS Transformer Pad Infinity. While some will argue that Nvidia's design wins are on the weak side, they have more announced design wins than their competitor, Qualcomm with the Snapdragon 800. It remains to be seen how Tegra 4 will pan out, but it looks like Doug and his team were able to sell more Tegra 4's than any of us (myself included) expected.
As such hiring goes, most of these moves are generally planned months if not years in advance and likely have no direct reflection upon AMD management's decision to hire due to poor earnings. AMD is supposedly expecting to return to profitability shortly, which would mean a big change for the company which has posted consecutive operating losses for the past 4 quarters with the last operating profit being posted in the 2Q of 2012.
The way things look for AMD right now, they are still a company that is in the changing phase. They do have some really skilled and capable people out there and the question will really be whether or not they can compete with Intel in key segments that matter to AMD and how Intel's changing product portfolio will impact AMD's own sales as well as their margins. Currently, Intel has more to lose than AMD considering AMD's current market share and stock market cap. As such, AMD is in a position to benefit from the current conditions, the question will really eventually be... can AMD come out with the right products and market them appropriately to bring the company out of it's funk.
The next 12 months are going to be very crucial for AMD and there are a lot of very smart people that are hoping that their own hard work will pay off. Because ultimately, we need a strong AMD in the semiconductor industry to push on Intel and Nvidia to make better products which will ultimately benefit consumers and the world as a whole with faster, cheaper compute.
We wish the best to Doug Stoakley, and knowing AMD's current GPU roadmap, the next few months at his new job should be fairly interesting.
