Published: Friday 31st August, 2007 | Author: Rod Savlon
Companies: AMD (All AMD content)
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email to a friendHEXUS can confirm that Rick Hegberg, AMD Senior Vice President of World Wide Sales, has effectively departed from the embattled Texan semi-conductor company.
A rumour of Hegberg’s resignation was first posted by sweet Fudo
early this morning and HEXUS can now confirm that this story is true.
Shockingly, this is the third leaving of a very senior AMD player in less than two months.
The first of this spat was the ‘resignation’ of Dave Orton, the well respected and much-liked ex-President and CEO of ATi Technologies on the 10th July, who upon leaving his role as AMD’s Executive Vice President of Visual and Media Businesses tellingly and politically stated “It is with mixed feelings that I am leaving AMD...”
The second was the news exclusively broken by HEXUS on the 22nd August regarding the resignation of Henri Richard, AMD’s Executive Vice President and Chief Sales and Marketing Officer.
Like Orton, Hegberg was also an ex-ATi executive and we understand
that one of his key roles within AMD was as a negotiator with its (ATi inherited)
Far Eastern Add-In-Board (AIB)graphics partners.
We’re wondering who has the expertise to step into the rapidly cooling shoes of
Hegberg or is it AMD’s discrete GPU business that is rapidly cooling?...
Especially since our understanding is that the teams within AMD responsible for its graphic business are struggling for budget and resource to even reengage with NVIDIA on a high-end technology level.
On the eve of arguably AMD’s most important product launch ever, its forthcoming next-generation quad-core, server processor codenamed ‘Barcelona’, could the timing of all these resignations have been ever worse?
Next week expect more from HEXUS on AMD ‘Barcelona’ and how its own customers are confused and frustrated over AMD’s extremely restricted media product sampling ‘strategy’ of this new product... which, it seems they believe, could cost them a packet at the expense of AMD endeavouring to tactically influence a, um, initial ‘proper understanding’ of the chip and its platform proposition by the hands-on sampling of the most appropriately friendly of ‘media partners’...
‘Barcelona’ seems to be beckoning like a yawning chasm and we’re increasingly thinking that even the man at the top might be reflecting upon his own position, for fear of AMD’s shareholders shovelling him in head first.
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Intel cannot stop people making x86 compatible CPUs AFAIKQuote
Who would there be to complain about the monopoly though? and what would there be to complain about??
Intel cannot stop people making x86 compatible CPUs AFAIK
Obviously there is no real competitor left to complain when a monopoly occurs, but I don't think the anti-monopoly people would have to wait for a complaint - the mere existence of a monopoly should be enough.
It's been universally recognised since the time of Adam Smith and before that a private monopolies are bad things for the market and I could see Intel being asked to split up, just like Microsoft narrowly avoided. In principle there's no need to find specific cause for complaint, a monopoly is bad, full stop (unless it's state-run, in which case it's for the greater good of the people, y'right).
MS is still not out of the woods in Europe and the EU has already sent a statement of objections to Intel so I would be quite concerned if I were Intel.
In answer to your last point, the question is: would some random pissy little x86 CPU maker be considered legitamate competition, given Intel's ability to swat it at any time if it wanted?
Can you name any area of its business in which AMD holds the upper hand over Intel right now? Can you see that changing at all? Even when AMD was beating Intel in the consumer desktop market it was still turning over a fraction of Intel's and the consumer desktop segment is in steep decline right now anyway.
Still, maybe it will strike back with the launch of Barcelona next week...Quote
Hidden functions in the OS that only MS application designers knew about and embedding an application into the OS (IE) with no way to un-bundle it.
The only parallel I can see that could be argued (and acted on) would be making all Intel CPU socket designs available for every CPU manufacturer to use............and that does not help if the competitors CPUs end up slower........although having a standard socket that everyone uses (like it used to be back in the day!) would be nice for the consumer..........but it would tie the hands of non-Intel CPU makers.Quote
Your paragraph about socket standardisation summarises precisely the kind of undesirable environment created by a monopoly, so you obviously secretly agree with me ;-)Quote
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