14 DAY TRIAL // By all accounts, Rory Read did a more than decent job in reforming AMD and getting it back into balance, even giving it a new direction to follow, where the impact from Intel's activities would be minimal.
And yet the man has stepped down from his position as chief executive officer. AMD didn't even give a week's warning. It just announced the change.
This much I've already covered: Read is stepping down as CEO and passing the mantle to Lisa Su, who has been acting as chief operating officer until now.
What hadn't been totally clear before was what Read would do from now on. Now, though, it's been stated that he will remain as an advisor until the end of the year.
After that, I can only assume he'll go to another company, or maybe take some time off. Maybe retire early even, since he's 52 years old now.
Either way, he probably won't stick with AMD because he probably wouldn't have completely left the board of directors if that were the case.
Sure, he might have surrendered his post as president of the board to Su, but he could have remained a member.
Perhaps he feels that with AMD's new freedom from Intel (relatively speaking, on the CPU/APU front) his services are no longer needed. Especially since his main role was cleaning house (read: firing lots of people suspected of leaking info or substandard work performance) and he's more or less done with that now.