AMD CTO Phil Hester out, no replacement named

http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9916898-37.html

"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 Keosheyan said that was an "outdated" description of what Hester's day-to-day responsibilities were at the company.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."

Guess he was part of the 10% layoffs...

It's sad, really. Haven't seen much from AMD in the last 2 years that's on-time, on-budget and performs up to their expectations. They're the gang that couldn't shoot straight...