AMD Chief Technology Officer Phil Hester resigned Friday, the third high-level departure in less than a year. The company said Hester is “pursuing other opportunities” and “has not disclosed his plans.”
When Hester was hired as CTO in 2005, he was charged with “guiding AMD’s processor advancements” as well as managing advanced infrastructure strategies and “focusing on the seamless integration of next-generation computing functionality into AMD-powered systems.”
Hester was in charge of Fusion, AMD’s next-generation processor, which is still 18 months away. AMD said it would not hire a new CTO but spread Hester’s duties across the technology officers of its five business units.
The departure comes just days after AMD warned it would not meet its projected revenues and laid off 10 percent of its 16,500-person global workforce. AMD said Hester’s resignation was not related to the layoffs. And Roger Kay, principal analyst of Endpoint Technologies, said there are no signals that Hester is leaving a sinking ship.
“They’re offering reconfigured jobs to a lot of top managers and he didn’t like what was offered,” Kay said. “He was a visionary, but they don’t need a lot of visionaries right now — they need to execute.” In addition, Hester was a “big salary,” Kay said. “AMD views his departure with mixed feelings.”
Are we seeing the meltdown of the only meaningful competitor to Intel? Not necessarily, Kay said. “They have a couple of good irons in the fire, but Fusion is still 18 months away,” he said. “They have a couple of good ideas, but they’re on choppy seas with a formidable adversary.”
AMD not only needs to execute on its upcoming products, Kay said, “they need some good luck.”
Before joining AMD, Hester founded Newisys, which designed enterprise-class servers based on AMD’s Opteron processor. He spent 23 years at…