What bad year? AMD's Hector Ruiz gets a raise
UPDATED: See lengthly explanation below.
Apparently blessed with the best salary-negotiating skills in the universe, AMD CEO Hector Ruiz is getting a raise.
After spending most of Thursday apologizing to financial analysts for AMD's performance in 2007, the company revealed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that Ruiz's compensation agreement was amended on Wednesday with his new salary: $1,124,000. Earlier this year, AMD said Ruiz made $1,046,358 in base salary (click for PDF) during 2006, with a total compensation package for the year of $12,848,435.
AMD's stock is down 60 percent in 2007. The company is about to write off some "material" portion of the $3.2 billion in goodwill it assigned to the acquisition of ATI Technologies, a sign that the company way overpaid for the graphics chip maker in 2006. AMD's decision to favor Dell over channel partners when it came to chip distribution backfired when Dell ran into all of its problems, dooming AMD to a $611 million first-quarter loss. And Barcelona, the quad-core processor AMD spent years hyping, won't arrive in any kind of major volume until the first quarter of next year due to a series of technical glitches.
But other than that, AMD's board of directors must have figured that Ruiz had a pretty good year. The move should allow Ruiz to remain the highest paid CEO among his peers in the semiconductor industry on Forbes' annual list of CEO pay next year.
UPDATED: 12/14: So as you might imagine, AMD called back today about this story.
It turns out that a senior member of AMD's public relations staff erred when confirming Thursday afternoon--prior to publishing this report--that Hector was given a raise this week. The raise in question actually came last year, and the $1,046,358 in the proxy statement reflected that Hector spent part of 2006 making $950,000, and part of 2006 making $1,124,000. Hector's annual salary rate has changed slightly since then, but by just $24,000 or so to reflect a different accounting treatment of a car expense.
Why did the SEC filing with the new rate come out yesterday, and not 18 months ago? They're not sure. Why did the representative and the people he spoke with not know how much money their boss was making? Also a good question.
But in any event, that's how this all happened. And Ruiz is still the highest-paid CEO in the semiconductor industry.
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom. 
Now they plain suck. They have nothing competitive against Intel's offerings, they've dragged their feet on Quad Core (Barcelona), and are a year or two behind Intel on 45nm. What gives???
The only SMART thing AMD did was buy ATI, but in retrospect it's starting to look like a bad idea...they've yet to come out w/ anything "compelling", least of all competitive to nVidia.
I think the ATI buyout has really killed off their CPU innovation; they are focusing everything on ATI and even less on CPU design.
This Ruiz guy should be fired, not praised, by the Stockholders.
Incompetence will be rewarded. Well, for top management anyway.
I always rooted for AMD to at least keep Intel competitive and to
keep them both pushing for better product. Looks like thats going
by the wayside now. Stockholders: Demand accountability from
Ruiz don't allow reward for his mismanagement! Sheesh!
-30's. AMD hasn't even begun 45nm production yet.
I disagree w/ you on ATI, now that I see what they've done with
it (err, nothing). At first I thought he was being crazy like a fox
and would build a CPU that also has a core or two sitting aside
for video processing (or at least pre-processing), and perhaps
an independant bus exclusive to video... that would've been a
decent idea (I think that's what Fusion was supposed to do). In
retrospect however, their purchase was stupid, ill-timed, and
got them nothing but huge losses.
And yeah, they should've fired Ruiz by now.
/P
Interestingly enough, Intel is humming right now whereas they were seen as bloated and tanking during the P4/NetBurst years...hopefully AMD can pull the same rabbit out of its hat in '08. Intel put all its R&D into shrinking the die and making it more efficient (Banias-core) and it proved to be a smart move in the long-run.
Barcelona (AMD's Quad Core) was a HUGE disappointment; I was holding out for it even as the Yonah (and later Merom) Intel chips were flying across the benchmarking sites but the latest production has flaws in it and it needs to be retooled. ::grr::
4x4 was a joke, too.....and don't get me started on the Turion line; SOI was its only "saving grace" but it's getting spanked by the Core 2's in just about every benchmark. Perhaps AMD could do something like REDESIGN the K6 line! It's 10+ years old and grossly inefficient in comparison to the
I will be buying a Core 2 Extreme desktop this weekend...my first Intel-based desktop in four years!
but bad luck with AMD chips.
Anybody who claims unregulated free enterprise works best is a fool and a chump. Or a CEO.
Sector (SPS) into the DIRT. No surprise his current company is in
the toilet. At Motorola, he was commonly referred to as "Hector the
sector wrecker"
--He has taken a company that was firing on all cylinders, from an engineering standpoint, and turned it into a company that can't get out of its own way when it comes to engineering
--The ATI investment was a complete disaster, as was predicted by almost every analyst in the industry at the time. AMD is going up against Intel, who has a market capitalization orders of magnitude larger than AMD. In other words Intel can afford to crank out new fabs, and new process nodes, much faster than AMD. That's how Intel has managed to keep ahead of AMD in production yields and production volume. The two things that AMD needed in order to compete were large investments in process technology and fabs. So Hector went and spent their precious resources purchasing a graphics card company that was losing market share hand over fist to nVidia. Stupid.
--Instead of trying to stop the bleeding, by at least delivering a "me too" product that could at least hold onto the market share gains that AMD had previously made, Hector decided to bet the farm on "Fusion", which will take 3-5 years to arrive. If AMD lives that long.
In retrospect it's hard to find one single strategic or tactical decision under Ruiz's leadership that hasn't been wrong. The Board at AMD needs to grow a spine and toss Ruiz out on the street. They should have done it years ago. Instead they perpetuate the bad decision that they made when they hired him. Perhaps it's time for the shareholders to vote with their dollars and toss the Board out on the street on top of Ruiz.
Unfortunately, AMD is the only real competition for Intel, and without them prices will rise and innovation will stagnate.
#2 (behind Intel) for computer CPU's. In three years, they had
dropped from being the runaway leader (back when Opterons
were the big dog and Intel was still futzing about with Itanium
chips), to being a bug-ridden also-ran (now that Intel sells dual
and quad core chips by the truckload, while AMD can't even
launch a product w/o it blowing up in their faces).
If anything, Ruiz needs to be fired.
Buying ATI was stupid, though at the rate things are going, it
may be the only profit-maker they have left.
Intel had to go through a radical upheaval after the Itanium
debacle (why do they still make that thing!?), and they managed
it damned well. They dropped the NetBurst crap and went with
much smoother tech.
It's now AMD's turn to buckle down. Phenom quite frankly sucks.
Taking an Opteron and duct-taping another to it on the die with
a few new features glued onto it... isn't going to impress anyone.
They need to get back to basics. And fast... before Intel winds
up swallowing them whole.
/P
So we're just back at status quo where AMD really only survives because Intel does not want the highly regulated environment that the feds will build around it if AMD disappears.
Why anyone would buy stock in a company whose survival depends on the 'kindness' of its competitor is beyond me.
In my opinion, the only way for AMD to beat Intel is to stop playing Intel's game. AMD must forge a new market. Ruiz needs to reassess the current state of the art in multicore CPU architecture and computer programming and find out what is wrong with it. And there is a lot that is wrong with it (see link below). AMD could conceivably kick Intel's ass if they could find a way to redefine the market. Now that the industry is transitioning from sequential computing to massive parallelism, AMD has the chance of lifetime to stop playing the me-too fiddle and change the face of computing in this century.
http://rebelscience.blogspot.com/2007/09/amd-can-kick-intels-ass-but-only-by.html
As for the RebelsScience blog posting... that's all well and good, but it's also a completely academic arguement. Face reality: there is an enormous (and when I say "enormous" I'm grossly understating) ecosystem supporting computing the way that it is done now. You don't change that overnight. A chip company isn't going to come in and redefine the way that computing is done. Intel tried it, on a smaller scale even, with the Itanium. And look where it ended up. You simply don't tell the entire industrialized world that they need to completely change the way that they develop systems and design and write software.
In the real world new concepts flow out of academia, and get incorporated piecemeal, over the course of decades, into the mainstream. AMD is not going to magically make a paradigm shift happen overnight. In fact no one company will. That's just not the way that the world works.
Add to that the fact that this is a concept coming from a questionable source (Rebelscience.blogspot.com) that spends most of its page space discussing the derivation of biology and partical physics from the Bible, and you're not exactly talking about an authoritative concept. I'm not saying it's wrong. I'm saying it's coming from a source with questionable credentials.
The ATI acquisition was allegedly going to provide tech-synergy, but was simply a huge waste of money. The "native quad core" approach has turned out to be a disaster, as it hasn't provided any real performance benefit as promised, but has helped delay the release of their next generation product.
A similar thing is happening at Microsoft, although their cash-cow products help disguise what a truly awful CEO Steve Ballmer is -- Windows Vista was the classic case of the "tech inmates running the asylum", with almost no actually beneficial new features, and with almost all the initial tech-features thrown out (WinFS, etc. -- most of which were *good* that they got eliminated!).
Contrast this with Intel CEOs who seem to be quite balanced between being tech-fluent and business-fluent. You need a good balance.
AMD ethic and social responsibility issues:
People wish to support AMD as an under dog with good heart good faith; however, we need to understand about who and what we set forward to provide our support.
The truth:
1/ AMD lied to the employee's that no one would get raise due to the financial crisis.
Hector's got an increase in his salary in 2007, at the same time the company has been continously punishing the workers with no raise and lay-offs.
2/Observed a couple of recent lay-offs, it seemed that the firm had cut the good people and preserved the corrupted political systems. Instead of investing in their R&D to buy sufficient equipments to perform an adequate engineering execution as well as to keep the good engineers (or hire more engineer), the firm continued to hide 65nm and 45nm product design problems, continued to hire high management levels at high cost, continued to live on the residual profit from Opteron/Athlon, which had been previously fixed and fine-tuned by a small bunch of good engineers and we were sure that the rewards were not there for these individuals as lay-off and no raise policy has been continuing.
3/On a global scale, many technical forums had indentified many AMD's weaknesses in design capability and process control. People could send AMD their sympathy, but mutually, AMD must live up to the people's expectation by gearing toward being a good running engine and by correcting many ethical issues internal to its operation.
In AMD we have more fat cats than just Hector Macho Camacho.
He and his followers do not deserve an intellectual analysis on their performance rating...they are beyond stupid! This is not harsh enough to describe it!
To understand HMC's (Hector Macho Camacho) intelligence, let's review Motorola's history of disaster, then look at the present course of AMD collapse in the CPU arena:(
- by Karen_boycd July 30, 2008 12:31 PM PDT
- I worked for AMD and have got to say Hector has got to be by far the worse CEO ever, I am hoping Dirk will make somenthing of this company again but since he was groomed by Hector I doubt it.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(27 Comments)In late winter early spring AMD anouced 10% layoffs throgh out the company and that very same day Hector had a brand new Ferrari delivered to the office, imagine how all the employees who lost their livelihoods felt???? But then again what do I know I only saw the compnay plumet in the time I spent there and the directors get richer.
Right after the 10% staff reduction AMD grew their Penang, Malasya operation by about 10%......mmmmmm wait a minute so it wasn?t that they reduced the staff they just outsouced it. Hector and the board of directors have betrayed the american worker and I hold them in the same regard as a certain bearded terrorist roaming the mountaisn of Pakistan, its plain treason.
Now if Hector was any kind of leader he, along with the board of directors should of continued to work with no salary until the compnay recovers, it is not like they are poor and strugling and I am sure they all have golden parachutes too and the only place they?ve led the company is down the toilet.
My question is this, didn?t the people that hired Hector know how he almost destroyed Motorola??? I am no genius but that would have been a clue for me not to hire him.