AMD: Jim Anderson Out, Saeid Moshkelani In as “Client Compute Group” General Manager
by Ryan Smith on August 27, 2018 5:40 PM EST
In a press release sent out this afternoon, AMD has announced a shuffle in leadership for the company’s client computing business unit, the core of AMD’s business and heart of their recent resurgence. Jim Anderson, who has been serving as the Senior Vice President and General Manager of AMD’s Computing and Graphics business group, is departing from the company. In his place, Saeid Moshkelani is being promoted to the position of Senior Vice President and General Manager of what AMD is dubbing the Client Compute Group.
Jim Anderson had been serving as the GM of the Compute and Graphics group for the past 3 years. In his position, he reported directly to Dr. CEO Lisa Su and was responsible for the entirety of AMD’s client computing business, overseeing engineering, sales, and the general strategy of the group. AMD originally brought Anderson on board to turn around their client computing group in its darkest hour towards the tail-end of the Bulldozer generation, and in that respect, Anderson has been extremely successful, as Ryzen CPU sales have been very strong for AMD.
After that success, however, Anderson has decided that he wants to leave to “pursue other opportunities”, according to AMD. And just looking at AMD’s hierarchy, as he was already SVP and GM of the group, there’s little room left inside of AMD for advancement. So for someone whose next step would be CEO, the best options are to either bide his time until the CEO spot becomes available (unlikely), or leave the nest and become a CEO at another company. In this case Anderson has opted for the latter, departing AMD and heading over to Lattice Semiconductor to be their new CEO.
Replacing Jim Anderson will be an AMD insider, Saeid Moshkelani. Moshkelani is an engineering track executive whom prior to joining AMD in 2012, worked as an engineer and later in various engineering management roles at other companies. Since joining AMD, he has been serving as the GM of the Semi-Custom business unit. Curiously, his LinkedIn profile lists him as being promoted to a Corporate Vice President and General Manager of AMD’s “Client compute Business Unit” in May. However AMD had never publicly announced that promotion, and it’s not clear to me whether this is retroactive, or something different from his new role.
At any rate, Moshkelani is now a Senior Vice President and the GM in charge of what AMD is calling their “Client Compute Group”. In practice his duties appear to be identical to Anderson’s, in that he’s overseeing every aspect of AMD’s client computing products. And like Anderson, he will now report directly to Lisa Su.
Overall, this executive shuffle is the latest high-profile departure for AMD. Anderson’s approximate counterpart on the GPU side of matters, Raja Koduri, left for Intel back at the end of 2017. So in the last year we’ve now seen the entire leadership of AMD’s client product groups replaced. And while the nature of these changes is rarely transparent – whether it’s someone leaving on their own volition or if AMD is cleaning house – what’s clear is that this is increasingly a very different AMD from what it was a short few years ago, with new product architectures and now new executives overseeing them.
Source: AMD
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Dragonstongue - Monday, August 27, 2018 - link
hope this bodes well for AMD to stay "at the edge" of doing the best possible products they can at a fair price to the end consumer (unlike their main competitors clawing things away or doing stupid moves but jumping the price every generation for not much gained on an even less costly to produce product that now sells for an even higher price)Here is hoping Zen 2 (the actual one, not the poorly named/marketed Ryzen+/Ryzen 2xxx chips) end up being awesome and are matched with equally awesome Polaris/Vga refreshes.
AMD has had awesome momentum the last 2 years (after barely making ends meet the past decade) I earnestly hope and wish they continue on this direction forcing competitors to follow suit or be buried in the process...
too long there was little choice of pay a bunch extra for "not much" generation to generation, they had some key releases (example Phenom II, Radeon HD 4xxx, Radeon HD 5xxx, Radeon HD 7xxx) but they lost the focus like they did with Athlon generation (had a very good lead and sat on their laurels instead of keeping the ball rolling)
They have solid leader ship now (Lisa Su, and her team that has stayed or she helped to assemble) now is time to make sure they keep that ball rolling.
I know they "pushed up" the launch of Vega refresh a quarter or so, would be nice to see them do this with Polaris refresh (likely to be called RX 6xx) as well as Zen 2 (7nm) and maybe even Navi..here is also hoping TSMC is able to produce enough wafers to keep everyone with the wafer/chips they need at a reasonable price so folks that have been waiting for awhile (example GPU) can finally get them at a much more affordable price compared to the greed pricing that has been as of late.
^.^
Yojimbo - Tuesday, August 28, 2018 - link
"hope this bodes well for AMD to stay "at the edge" of doing the best possible products they can at a fair price to the end consumer (unlike their main competitors clawing things away or doing stupid moves but jumping the price every generation for not much gained on an even less costly to produce product that now sells for an even higher price)"Yes, sure. The continued brain drain will mean their "best possible products" are worse than their competitors and so they will sell them at a "fair price".
Let's hope they can execute better than the last time an Intel misstep coincided with a promising AMD CPU architecture. They are still working to gain trust back due to that prior fiasco. They probably have 2 years at most before Intel comes out with an updated CPU architecture and sorts out their manufacturing woes.
close - Tuesday, August 28, 2018 - link
"the last time an Intel misstep coincided with a promising AMD CPU architecture" was when AMD came out with Athlon64. that was 2003 and it was a smashing success... except for some not very legal moves from Intel.The last time AMD had a (proper) fiasco was Bulldozer and that was right around the time Intel was at the peak of power, far from any misstep (Sandy Bridge times).
tjmaxx credit card payment online - Thursday, August 30, 2018 - link
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wrkingclass_hero - Tuesday, August 28, 2018 - link
I don't like to see eveyone jumping ship...maryo11 - Tuesday, September 11, 2018 - link
Great, now another setback for AMD. How will they survive? This is not looking good for the ones with AMD stocks. https://itsquickpayportal.com/