Updated throughout at 10:30am PT after speaking with AMD.
AMD's chief technology officer, Phil Hester, has resigned his post atop the company's engineering efforts.
Former AMD CTO Phil Hester
(Credit: AMD)According to a flash report from The Wall Street Journal, Hester will not be replaced. An AMD spokesman confirmed that Friday is Hester's last day with the company, and that he's "looking to do new things." A link to Hester's biography off AMD's executive Web page defaults back to the home page.
Hester came to AMD from IBM in September of 2005, when the chipmaker was flying high on the success of its Opteron server processor. He's leaving at a low point for AMD, having presided over the debacle that was AMD's quad-core server processor, Barcelona. Barcelona finally became available in mass quantities this week after a year of delays caused by technical glitches and design issues.
Rob Keosheyan, an AMD spokesman, said Hester's involvement with Barcelona was not "hands on," although his biography on AMD's site said Hester was "responsible for setting the architectural and product strategies and plans for AMD's microprocessor business." Keosheyan said that was an "outdated" description of what Hester's day-to-day responsibilities were at the company.
Most of Hester's time was spent tackling AMD's ambitious Fusion project, which is now known as its accelerated computing initiative. Fusion is AMD's plan to integrate a graphics processor onto a CPU, and was the inspiration for the company's acquisition of ATI Technologies in 2006. But the first chip designed in this manner, a notebook chip code-named Swift, isn't expected to arrive until the second half of 2009, leaving quite a gap between now and then for Hester's replacements to iron out the kinks.
It's true that Hester isn't being directly replaced, Keosheyan said, but Hester has worked to "distribute" the CTO's responsibilities across individual business units, like server chips or graphics chips. As of next week, the individual CTOs will report to their business unit leaders, such as Mario Rivas, head of the processor group. One exception will be the accelerated computing initiative, which will report directly to President and COO Dirk Meyer.
AMD announced plans to lay off 10 percent of its workforce earlier in the week after also relaying the news of a revenue shortfall.
SUNNYVALE, Calif.--AMD's Fusion chip will come in two varieties, one for PCs and servers and another for consumer electronics devices.
Bulldozer is the code name for the Fusion chip that will be designed for everything from servers to handhelds, said Phil Hester, AMD's chief technology officer. Bobcat is the name for a sub 10-watt x86 chip that AMD believes can power ultramobile PCs, cell phones and existing consumer electronics chips using the ARM or MIPS architectures.
You call in a bulldozer when you need a lot of earth moved in a short amount of time, Hester said. That's the idea for Bulldozer, in that it's the design that AMD wants to form the basis of its server and PC chips by the end of the decade. Bulldozer will be part of the "Falcon" PC platform that also includes an integrated memory controller, a graphics processor, cache memory and a PCI Express controller.
Bobcats, however, can be found in back yards and smaller spaces where you don't want to use a shovel, but you can't get away with a bulldozer. (I've always wanted to tool around in a Bobcat for a few hours.) These chips represent AMD's hope for getting x86 chips into handheld devices.
While x86 chips rule the PC market, it's really hard to find one in a smart phone. Both Intel and AMD are very interested in figuring out how to get their silicon inside this fast-growing part of the tech industry, and Hester thinks x86's time will come as software for handsets grows more powerful and the chips themselves become more power-efficient.
Hester also revealed a few more details about Sandtiger, the code name for AMD's 2009 server chip disclosed earlier in the morning. Sandtiger will use between 8 and 16 Bulldozer cores, but AMD might build smaller versions to take advantage of certain cases in which 4 cores make more sense, he said.
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