14 DAY TRIAL // Advanced Micro Devices' chief technology officer, Phil Hester, has just stepped down. The news was broken by one of the company's spokespersons, who also said that Hester will not be replaced yet. The resignation is effective immediately, as the ex-CTO is "looking to do new things."
Hester was recruited by the company is September 2005, after his prolonged stay with server manufacturer IBM. Back then, AMD was running at its peak performance, and the new Opteron server chips were the best-sellers on the CPU market.
The company's CTO resignation is at least intriguing, as it comes right after the company finally managed to ship mass quantities of its Barcelona-based Opteron chips. His departure from Advanced Micro Devices could be related to the recently-announced 10 percent layoffs that affect all the company's board. The speculation is also fueled by the fact that his place will stay vacant for an unknown period.
According to Rob Keosheyan, an AMD spokesman, Hester had little involvement in the baking process of the Barcelona processors, although his technical profile reads that Hester was "responsible for setting the architectural and product strategies and plans for AMD's microprocessor business."
Keosheyan however, denied this aspect, and said that his job description had not been updated for a long time. More than that, right after his resignation was disclosed, his profile on the AMD webpage was deleted and re-routed back to the AMD index.
During his stay at AMD, Hester was also involved in the Fusion project, AMD's platform that integrates graphics cores onto the CPU silicon. In fact, the Fusion chip was the main reason that triggered the ATI takeover back in 2006.
However, the first Fusion chip (also known as the Swift) is slated for mass-availability in late 2009, which means that Hester's departure will leave the project in a suspended state until the company appoints a new executive.