14 DAY TRIAL // Dave Orton, former president and CEO at the video chip maker ATI, has resigned as executive vice president of AMD just nine months after the two companies combined. AMD completed the merging with ATI in October last year and Dave Orton was given the position of executive vice president of AMD, as part of the merging deal.
Orton said that he leaves AMD with "mixed feelings" and that he is "very optimistic about AMD's future." In an interview, Orton explained that the "heavy lifting" of combining the two companies is finished, "the integration is progressing very well" and that "it seemed like the time to move on". Also the former CEO said that he has no immediate business plans and that he may consider returning to AMD in the future.
While president and CEO of ATI, Dave Orton led the competition with the rival company NVIDIA, in building high-end graphics boards for PCs, cell phones, smart phones and gaming devices, AMD plans to outperform its rival, Intel, by creating a single chip named "Fusion" that contains a x86 microprocessor and an ATI graphic processor. Dirk Meyer, AMD's president and CEO said that his company wanted to retain Orton and his ATI colleagues because of their ability to prove that ATI can be a success in the graphics and chipset markets and because he was one of the "key drivers" in the successful integration of AMD and ATI.
AMD will not seek a replacement for Dave Orton, but instead will promote two of his deputies from ATI, Adrian Hartog and Rick Bergman. They will now report directly to Dirk Meyer and Hector Ruiz, AMD's CEOs, said AMD spokesman Mike Haase. The promotion of the two top managers from ATI was met with approval by John Spooner, a senior analyst at Technology Business Research, as he concluded "it was a bit of a surprise, but I think it makes sense."
This week started as a very busy one for AMD, as the company announced on Monday that is was cutting prices for all of its desktop processors in an attempt to regain profitability. In the longer run AMD has great hopes for its new "Barcelona" core that will sale as a quad-core Opteron server chip. Barcelona will directly compete against Intel's "Woodcrest"( dual-core) and "Clovertown"( quad-core) processors launched last year and the yet to be released quad-core "Harpertown" server chip due in the last months of 2007.