Mark Papermaster Becomes AMD Senior Vice President and CTO

It appears that AMD is not done with executive changes and such, as a new Chief Technology officer was chosen, namely Mark Papermaster, formerly of Cisco and, before that, senior VP at Apple.

AMD's new CEO Rory P. Read already made a few management changes, like the departure of Rick Bergman.

Now, someone new is joining the company, someone who used to be the working with Cisco and, before that, with Apple and even IBM.

That someone is Mark Papermaster and will work directly under Rory P. Read, as senior vice president and chief technology officer.

“The newly-created technology and engineering group aligns all of AMD’s outstanding technical talent into a centralized team which will improve our time-to-market and help lift our execution across the board. Most importantly, this new organization accelerates our ability to consistently deliver on our customer commitments and help our customers win,” said Read.

Papermaster will supervise the activities of the engineering teams of AMD Products Group and the R&D efforts led by Senior Vice President of Research and Development Chekib Akrout.

In other words, the CTO will have to lead the AMD processor core development and the SoC design methodology.

“Mark’s appointment significantly strengthens AMD’s senior leadership,” the AMD CEO said.

“Mark has held substantial engineering roles for three of the technology industry’s most innovative companies. He is a proven winner who knows the industry, knows our customers and flat out knows technology.

Considering AMD's current troubles, Mark Papermaster probably has his work cut out for him.

After all, restoring AMD's reputation after the Bulldozer flub (which already caused a price cut for the flagship CPU) will be no easy task

He will need to take special care when setting up AMD's technology and product roadmaps and managing the integrated hardware and software development.