AMD names Lenovo’s Rory Read as new CEO

By Geoff Duncan August 25, 2011

AMD CEO Rory Read — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Chipmaker AMD has named Rory Read as its new CEO, effective immediately. Read comes to AMD from five years at PC maker Lenovo, where he was most recently company president and chief operating officer; before working at Lenovo, Read put in 23 year with IBM, including serving as general manager for business consulting services in teh South Pacific as well as managing director for IBM’s Consulting Services division. AMD has also appointed Read to the company board of directors.

“Rory is a proven leader with an impressive record of driving profitable growth,” said AMD chairman Bruce Claflin, in a statement. “He is ideally suited to accelerate AMD’s evolution into the world’s leading semiconductor design company.”

Reads appointment follows more than eight months after AMD’s previous CEO Dirk Meyer resigned in what the company described as a “mutual decision” over a reported disagreement involving the company’s mobile strategy. AMD launched a search for a new CEO immediately, although there hasn’t been much word on what other candidates were considered for the role: rumors have focussed on former NCR and Intel executives, as well as former HP CEO Mark Hurd and now-Apple CEO Tim Cook. In the meantime, Thomas Seifert had been serving as interim CEO for the company; with Read’s appointment, he will return to his role as senior vice president and CFO.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming

In the meantime, AMD has worked to consolidate its turf in high-performance graphics processing (where it competes primarily with Nvidia) and launched its new Fusion line of APU processors with integrated graphics, specifically geared to compete with Intel’s second-generation Core processors and myriad Atom offerings.

Read’s time with IBM and Lenovo demonstrated an aptitude for taking companies into new product areas and maintaining profitability. Those traits may help Read in his new role, although he certainly faces challenges: both Lenovo and AMD have been late to enter the burgeoning market for tablet devices, and AMD has been struggling to compete against Intel in the high-end server market.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

AMD
Lenovo

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

Computing

AMD’s new Ryzen 8040 CPUs aren’t all that new

AMD revealing its Ryzen 8040 CPUs.

AMD new Ryzen 8040 CPUs aren't as new as they seem. During its Advancing AI event, AMD announced that Ryzen 8040 chips are coming to laptops, and you'd be forgiven for thinking it was a new generation of processors. AMD doesn't call them next-gen CPUs, rather referring to them as "the next step in personal AI processing." And that's because these aren't next-gen CPUs.

Ryzen 8040 mobile chips will replace Ryzen 7040 mobile chips, and based on that fact alone, it's easy to assume that the Ryzen 8040 CPUs are better. They have a higher number! From what AMD has shared so far, though, these supposedly new chips look like nothing more than a rebrand of the CPUs already available in laptops. AMD set itself up for this type of confusing, misleading situation, too.
New name, old cores
First, how do we really know these are just rebranded Ryzen 7040 chips? I've included the full product stack below that spells it out. These chips, code-named Hawk Point, are using AMD's Zen 4 CPU cores and RDNA 3 GPU cores, which the previous-generation Phoenix CPUs also used. There's also the NPU, which I'll circle back to in a moment.

Computing

AMD retracts its new gaming feature after it was getting players banned

Gamer using Discord on a gaming desktop PC.

AMD has released a new graphics driver update that disables its newly introduced Anti-Lag+ technology in all supported games. The latest graphics driver (23.10.2) is a follow-up to 23.10.1, which launched almost a week ago and introduced Anti-Lag+ for Counter-Strike 2.

AMD has confirmed via the official release notes that the reason for disabling the anti-lag tech is due to recent reports about certain online games that were identifying Anti-Lag+ as a hacking tool, which then resulted in player bans. AMD also said that it is actively working with game developers and hopes to find a solution to reenable Anti-Lag+ and reinstate gamers who were impacted by the anti-cheat bans.

Computing

AMD’s new CPUs decisively end the high-performance battle with Intel

A person holding the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X.

AMD is putting its foot down. In what Donny Woligroski, senior processor technical marketing manager at AMD, called the "worst-kept secret" in the world of desktop processors, Team Red announced it's bringing its wildly popular Threadripper chips back to high-end desktops. They're destined to be some of the best processors money can buy, and Intel currently has no way to compete.

If you're not up to speed, AMD quietly and unceremoniously ended its Threadripper series for desktops a little over a year ago. When the company announced its previous generation of Threadripper CPUs, it revealed it would stick with the Enterprise-grade Pro series chips going forward. A little over 12 months after that announcement, AMD is reversing course.