AMD announces CEO change

AMD CEO Rory Read has stepped down and is being replaced by current chief operating officer, Lisa Su. Read took office as CEO of AMD three years ago and has made a significant change of course.

Read will remain involved with AMD in an advisory role in the CEO transition until the end of 2014, AMD reports. He joined AMD in 2011, after being coo at Lenovo, and succeeded Dirk Meyer, who at the time did not provide the better results that had been hoped for. It is not clear whether disappointing results are also the reason that Read is leaving the field.

Under Read, AMD took a different course, with less competition with Intel in the consumer chips market and more entry into new markets. For example, AMD is expanding its activities with custom APUs, with which it is successful with the consoles from Sony and Microsoft. AMD is also developing arm chips for servers and under Read, the manufacturer of microservers Seamicro was acquired, among other things.

The reorganization has brought AMD’s costs down significantly and debt has remained relatively stable, but at the same time, the chip design company has still suffered significant quarterly losses in recent years, with only a few profits.

Lisa Su was brought to AMD by Read in 2012. Prior to that, she was chief technology officer at Freescale and held technical positions at IBM and Texas Instruments.