By
Damon Poeter
18 July 2008 09:42AM
Tags:
ruiz | meyer | amd
Hector Ruiz is out as chief executive at Advanced Micro Devices as the struggling chip maker on Thursday reported its seventh consecutive quarter in the red to the tune of a US$1.19 billion loss in the second quarter of this year.
Hector Ruiz is out as chief executive at Advanced Micro Devices as the struggling chip maker on Thursday reported its seventh consecutive quarter in the red to the tune of a $1.19 billion loss in the second quarter of this year. Dirk Meyer, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD's president and chief operating officer, has been elected by AMD's board to replace Ruiz as CEO, according to the company.
Ruiz joined Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD as president and COO in January 2000 following a 22-year career with Motorola, where he had been president of the company's Semiconductor Products Sector. Ruiz will stay on in a director's capacity at AMD, he said on Thursday's Q2 earnings call, where the news was announced at about 2pm PT.
AMD's second quarter was described as "a tough one" by AMD chief financial officer Robert Rivet. Over $1 billion in losses included an $880 billion writedown to the company's consumer electronics business, reported last Friday by AMD. The company has decided to divest its Handheld and DTV product businesses, which represented US$920 million in losses over the just concluded quarter.
Meyer, like Ruiz, has an engineering background. He was co-architect of the Alpha 21064 and 21264 microprocessors at Digital Equipment Corp., where he worked for nearly a decade before joining AMD in 1995. He led engineering for the Athlon microprocessor at AMD and in April 1999 was named VP of engineering. He became a group vice president and GM of AMD's microprocessor business in 2001 and the following year was named an executive officer.
Asked if there would be strategic changes at AMD with his promotion, Meyer stressed his respect for Ruiz and the collegial nature of their partnership in running the company, but added that, "Looking forward, there will certainly be some changes."
More to come after AMD's conference call.
See original article on CRN.com