AMD Chooses New Senior VP and CSO

Looks like Advanced Micro Devices finally found someone the new CEO (Rory Read) deemed worthy of being handed the mantle of senior VP and Chief Strategy Officer.

The man who will fill the position of Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer at AMD from now on is Rajan Naik.

Previously a Partner in McKinsey & Company's Technology practice, he has a bachelor's degree in engineering from Cornell University and a PhD in engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Of course, the degrees alone did not get him this high-profile position.

Naik spent 11 years providing counsel to various technology and telecom companies while at McKinsey & Company.

In addition to that, Mr. Naik acted as senior engineer at Intel (prior to McKinsey and Co.) and, before that, as member of the Lucent Technologies technical staff.

“Rajan Naik possesses a strong track record of execution in strategic planning, product and market strategy, and operational performance,” the AMD CEO, Rory Read said.

“He will help ensure strategic and operational alignment across our business to take advantage of growth opportunities in lower power, emerging markets and cloud computing.”

Advanced Micro Devices may just be nearing the end of the period of reform which started when Read took up the reins.

Currently, even though Bulldozer turned out to be an unfortunate flub, the Sunnyvale company is enjoying a high degree of satisfaction thanks to the Radoen HD 7970 video card.

Having gone up for sale just a short time ago, the card has already sold out on Newegg (in just a few hours, in fact).

Hopefully, for AMD's sake, Rajan Naik will perform well as the one responsible for short-term and long-term strategy development (investments, partnerships, market opportunities).

Now, the world just has to wait and see what CPUs (central processing unit), GPUs (graphics processing unit) or APUs (accelerated processing unit) the corporation will show off next.