[Enter]

HEXUS can confirm that Rick Hegberg, AMD Senior Vice President of World Wide Sales, has effectively departed from the embattled Texan semi-conductor company.

A rumour of Hegberg’s resignation was first posted by sweet Fudo early this morning and HEXUS can now confirm that this story is true.

Shockingly, this is the third leaving of a very senior AMD player in less than two months.

The first of this spat was the ‘resignation’ of Dave Orton, the well respected and much-liked ex-President and CEO of ATi Technologies on the 10th July, who upon leaving his role as AMD’s Executive Vice President of Visual and Media Businesses tellingly and politically stated “It is with mixed feelings that I am leaving AMD...�

The second was the news exclusively broken by HEXUS on the 22nd August regarding the resignation of Henri Richard, AMD’s Executive Vice President and Chief Sales and Marketing Officer.

Like Orton, Hegberg was also an ex-ATi executive and we understand that one of his key roles within AMD was as a negotiator with its (ATi inherited) Far Eastern Add-In-Board (AIB)graphics partners.

We’re wondering who has the expertise to step into the rapidly cooling shoes of Hegberg or is it AMD’s discrete GPU business that is rapidly cooling?...

Especially since our understanding is that the teams within AMD responsible for its graphic business are struggling for budget and resource to even reengage with NVIDIA on a high-end technology level.

On the eve of arguably AMD’s most important product launch ever, its forthcoming next-generation quad-core, server processor codenamed ‘Barcelona’, could the timing of all these resignations have been ever worse?

Next week expect more from HEXUS on AMD ‘Barcelona’ and how its own customers are confused and frustrated over AMD’s extremely restricted media product sampling ‘strategy’ of this new product... which, it seems they believe, could cost them a packet at the expense of AMD endeavouring to tactically influence a, um, initial ‘proper understanding’ of the chip and its platform proposition by the hands-on sampling of the most appropriately friendly of ‘media partners’...

‘Barcelona’ seems to be beckoning like a yawning chasm and we’re increasingly thinking that even the man at the top might be reflecting upon his own position for fear of AMD’s shareholders shovelling him in head first.


http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=9747