Jim Anderson, general manager of AMD’s computing and graphics business group, is the latest exec to leave AMD. Anderson was in charge of overseeing all client computing products in AMD’s lineup, and was steering the division when the company launched one of its most successful products to date: the AMD Ryzen processors.
The department, which covers almost every consumer-facing product in AMD’s lineup, will now be headed by Saeid Moshkelani, whose humble beginnings at AMD began in the semi-custom division. He will now be reporting directly to AMD CEO Lisa Su on all things client computing, and that means the next generation of CPUs, Zen 2 on 7nm, will all fall under his remit.
Anderson’s departure marks another of AMD’s stalwart employees leaving the company, but at least this time it’s not to join rivals Intel. Anderson will be joining Lattice Semiconductor as president and CEO. The company builds field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) for various implementations, and was recently close to being bought out by Canyon Bridge, a firm reportedly backed by the Chinese government, before President Donald Trump blocked the acquisition under national security concerns.
Previous AMD departures over the last 12 months have included Raja Koduri, chief architect and big boss of RTG for many years, and Chris Hook, director of product marketing. Both left to join Intel’s ranks and have begun working on a discrete graphics product that Chipzilla is prepping for launch in 2020. Jim Keller also left AMD a few years back, and after a short stint at Tesla, has similarly joined Intel as VP of silicon engineering.
“We see significant opportunities to continue gaining share and accelerate our growth in the client processor market based on the strength of our premium AMD Ryzen product portfolio and our long-term roadmaps,” AMD CEO Lisa Su says. “Saeid and Darren (senior VP of global computing and graphics sales and EMEA president) are the right leaders to combine our product leadership with strong and strategic customer relationships as we enter our next phase of growth in the client PC market.
“I am grateful to Jim for his many contributions to AMD and wish him the very best as he begins a new chapter in his career,” Su continues.
AMD has confirmed it’s working on many Zen architecture simultaneously, and so the next half-decade is all under Moshkelani’s control. AMD has big plans for 2019, or so we’re told, and it’s hard to say for definite whether a staff change at the executive level will affect AMD’s direction from here on out. I’d assume it won’t make a blind bit of difference, however.
AMD has been enjoying record financial and product success in the last year, even hitting new highs not seen for over a decade only a few days ago. Su is surely staying the course from here on out to keep the company’s momentum going as it moves into 7nm with Zen 2 and Threadripper CPUs, and next-gen Navi graphics cards.