Management Toolkit

Orton resigns from AMD

Tom Krazit CNET News

Published: 11 Jul 2007 10:43 BST

Dave Orton, an executive vice president of AMD, will step down at the end of July, AMD said on Tuesday.

Orton, the former chief executive of ATI, will not be replaced. Instead, the heads of AMD's graphics and consumer electronics businesses will report directly to Dirk Meyer, AMD's president, and Hector Ruiz, AMD's chief executive.

Dave Orton came over to AMD when it acquired ATI Technologies last year, but his tenure at the company will have been brief.

ATI was a struggling business when AMD acquired it last year for $5.4bn (£2.7bn). AMD wanted ATI's chipset business to compete with Intel's ability to offer PC makers a package of processors, chipsets and other hardware. It also wanted the graphics business as part of an ambitious project called Fusion to integrate a CPU and a GPU onto a single chip, which the company thinks will deliver much better graphics performance by the end of the decade.

But AMD has been forced to deal with near-term realities this year, as the cash cow that was funding development of the Fusion project has dried up.

The average selling prices of AMD's server chips, as well as company profits, have taken a severe hit this year as it attempts to compete against Intel's quad-core server chips with dual-core models.

Barcelona, AMD's initial quad-core server chip, is coming soon but could arrive just as Intel is ready to introduce a more powerful second-generation quad-core chip.