AMD announced that three of its top executives are leaving the company, a few months after new CEO Lisa Su took over and started reorganizing. The departing execs include John Byrne, former General Manager for AMD’s computing and graphics group; Colette LaForce, the company’s Chief Marketing Officer; and Rajan Naik, the Chief Strategy Officer.
An AMD spokesperson said in a statement that the three executives are simply looking for new opportunities, although it seems like the new AMD CEO wants some fresh thinking that can turn AMD around.
“These changes to the leadership team reporting into our CEO are a part of implementing an optimal organization design and leadership team to drive AMD’s future growth.”
AMD’s revenue has been declining for the past few quarters, even though AMD managed to win contracts for the chips inside the Playstation 4 and the Xbox One consoles a little more than a year ago, which should have brought the company a significant increase in sales. However, AMD’s PC and server businesses are not doing so well lately and are dragging the company’s total revenue down.
AMD saw a 65 percent profit drop in its third quarter last year, followed by a 13 percent revenue drop in the next quarter, while Wall Street analysts were expecting the company’s revenue to be flat or slightly higher than before.
Lisa Su, the new CEO, has already started hiring new executives such as Forrest Norrod from Dell and James Clifford from RF Micro Devices. AMD has also given two of its Senior VPs, Mark Papermaster (former Senior VP for Devices Hardware Engineering at Apple) and Devinder Kumar, its current CFO, retention stock awards to keep them around.
AMD suffers from multiple problems that work against the company’s success, from having a less powerful single-thread CPU micro-architecture than Intel, to using much older process nodes to build its chips, to having financial troubles that don’t allow the company to invest in the research it needs to catch up to (or even surpass) Intel.
Turning the company around would be difficult for any CEO. AMD does have a new CPU micro-architecture in the pipeline, along with a new GPU architecture, and it may even start using more cutting-edge process nodes soon that should shrink the gap in performance and power consumption between its processors and Intel’s chips.
