He will handle the relationship between global sales organization and customer needs

Feb 17, 2012 08:46 GMT  ·  By

Yet another staff change has come upon Advanced Micro Devices, though this time the news is not about an executive leaving but a new one being chosen.

According to the latest announcement on the part of the Sunnyvale, California-based company, there is a new senior vice president and general manager of Global Accounts in the house.

The person who has assumed the position is John Byrne, previously the manager of AMD's America sales and marketing organization.

In this new position, he will have to maintain the relationship between the company's worldwide sales channels and customer needs.

"In this critical new role, John will be responsible for driving account management for our key global customers, reinforcing AMD's position as a trusted supplier," said Read.

"John has consistently demonstrated an ability to help customers win in the marketplace and understands that when our customers win, AMD wins. In his new position, John will have greater responsibility and ability to drive this understanding across our entire sales force by building deeper relationships with our multinational partners and ensuring we deliver on our commitments."

Byrne will report directly to the AMD CEO Rory Read and will likely have his work cut out for him as acting chief sales officer, since there might be some supply issues with the 28nm GPUs.

There were no reports speaking of the Radeon products directly, but we have just learned that TSMC is suffering from poor 28nm chip yields.

In a report that cited NVIDIA's CEO, it was stated that the foundry was going through much the same situation as with the 40nm, back in 2009-2010.

Since TSMC's same technology is used for making AMD 28nm products, logic dictates that the Sunnyvale, California company's situation is not all that favorable either.

It is impossible to tell how long it will take TSMC to get chip yields to a viable level. Hopefully, not years like before.