AMD Reorganizes Business Units; Names Dr. Lisa Su as COO
by Ryan Smith on June 13, 2014 11:00 AM EST
In a move that will mark a mild shake up in how AMD operates, AMD has announced that they will be undergoing a company reorganization next month. Come July 1st, AMD will be consolidating their various business groups into just two groups, and overseeing those groups will be Dr. Lisa Su, who will become the company’s new Chief Operating Officer (COO).
AMD is citing the reorganization as the latest step in their efforts to transform the company, a process that started in earnest over two years ago in 2012. Since then the company has been making changes to move away from its traditional cost-heavy PC CPU and GPU roots and towards a structure that is focused on mobile (x86 and ARM), semi-custom silicon, and other market areas with lower margins but also lower costs that are more sustainable for a company of AMD’s size and capabilities. AMD is nearing the end of that transformation – after years of losses they’re now approaching profitability at their desired margins – with AMD realigning their business groups ahead of some of their final steps, including becoming a fully ambidextrous company through designs such as the K12 CPU.
As part of that general transformation AMD’s business groups have already begun to overlap some, so now AMD is taking the next step by making it official and consolidating the relevant groups. AMD’s client, consumer graphics, and professional graphics groups will now be combined under a single group, the Computing and Graphics Business Group. By bringing together those three groups like this, this change effectively consolidates all of AMD’s core technology teams in to the same group, CPU and GPU alike. In this case in particular the lines between CPU and GPU have already been blurring for some time, with the bulk of AMD’s “CPU” business having shifted to APUs (CPUs with integrated graphics), so in a sense this is the formalization of the fact that AMD cannot build complete CPUs without technology from their graphics group.
Meanwhile AMD’s second group will be the Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom Business Group. This group consolidates the server, embedded, and semi-custom groups under one roof. This structure does mean CPUs are essentially split – an Opteron sale is now an Enterprise sale rather than being kept with the Computing group CPU sales – but otherwise this marks the combining of AMD’s “fringe” groups such as SeaMicro and the semi-custom groups, which in contrast to the core technology focused Computing group are focused on building designs and applications around AMD’s core technologies.
Both of these new groups will also see their relevant sales appendages integrated into them. AMD currently has a separate sales division, which will no longer be the case after the reorganization.
Heading up these groups both directly and indirectly will be Dr. Lisa Su, who is getting a promotion from Senior VP and GM of Global Business Units to the C-level position of Chief Operating Officer (COO). AMD has not had a COO for a few years now, so this marks the return of that position to AMD’s executive organization and arguably makes Lisa AMD's second-in-command. Meanwhile AMD’s Chief Sales Officer, John Byrne, will also be getting a promotion of his own, which will see him move up to SVP and GM of the Computing group.
In regards to AMD’s new structure, Lisa will be taking direct control of the Enterprise group on an interim basis. Meanwhile Lisa will have indirect oversight of the Computing group, with John serving as GM of that group and reporting to Lisa. Lisa in turn will now report directly to CEO Rory Read.
Ultimately the consolidation of AMD’s businesses is not unexpected, especially on the core technology side where APUs and AMD’s HSA initiative has greatly worn away the distinctions between CPUs and GPUs. Meanwhile the shifts in leadership bring with it new mangers and new reporting structures, so although things will be changing at AMD it doesn’t sound like AMD’s development processes will be affected on the whole – though management shifts often come with smaller internal changes.
But perhaps the single most visible change from this may end up being how AMD reports their financials. Currently AMD separates their CPU and GPU businesses as the Computing Solutions and Graphics Solutions respectively, with Graphics also including semi-custom business and game console royalties. If AMD changes their financial reporting to match their new businesses then we’d be able to more easily see how AMD’s semi-custom and console businesses stack up, but AMD’s CPU and GPU businesses would be indistinguishable. AMD hasn’t commented on the matter in their press release, so we’ll have to see what they do for their Q3’14 results later this year (where the combined groups will have been in effect for a whole quarter). Update: AMD tells us that we can expect an update on how they'll be reporting financials in their Q2 earnings call next month.
Source: AMD
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TheJian - Sunday, June 15, 2014 - link
No only announced. You can't SHIP anything without having the chips in your hands for 4.5-6 months. So I don't understand your statement. Nothing will really be announced until AFTER shield2, and they know how many they can start shipping to others. If you were making ANY products, would you announce them before finding out if you can even get enough for a product launch? NO. That just ends up pissing off customers stuck on backorder. Everyone works like this.TheJian - Sunday, June 15, 2014 - link
You do realize they won the shows awards right? You may not be interested but people like google etc are. Car makers are etc. We will see how K1 does, but many devices are coming. They are just shipping chips now probably if that as most will go into shield 2 first as they did last year to allow ramp before giving them to bigger customers. Shield is a great way to advertise the chip's qualities during ramp. Shield R1 was july 31st device so not sure why you draw conclusions when likely nobody is getting them. Tell me this again at xmas when the OEM's have had the 4-6 months required to put out a product. I expect them to tell us more at Google I/O shortly and maybe even a gaming tablet announcement by google/nv. I'm sure shield 2 will be all over the floor just like last year front and center (only Anandtech ignored this...as usual).Not sure how anyone can call shield a flop, they only have to sell 100K to profit, and they don't need to profit for a few years just not lose on it. IT was $10mil to dev, just like grid. The best way to spend money IMHO being so cheap to dev. They just drop in a new chip each year and keep adding more games. Have you been to tegrazone or seen all the console-like stuff on google's play store recently? They are adding massively and quality is on the up. It's not angry birds today, far from it. Have you seen the reviews at amazon etc. 4-4.5 stars, no whiners. Is there any other chip company pushing android so much? This is the first rev that will get deskop gpu's into mobile and people are starting to notice as everyone knows what a kepler is if they're involved in gaming at all. It will keep growing.
They rev the Tegra tabs yearly now. K1 already shown to "thrash" S800,801 and at worst tie or better S805.
http://www.evolife.cn/html/2014/77075.html
Just one of the articles. They've already benchmarked denver (not out until xmas), benchmarks are out for shield 2, mipad, thinkvision aio etc. As the gpu gains as the #1 reason you buy mobile instead of the last decade where it was the modem (even anand said it's not about the modem not long ago), we'll see NV take over some sales. We spend ~70% of our time on mobile playing games, and 40-65% of sales at the 4 major stores (google, apple, MS, amazon) are games. When you're pushing games and already have 20yrs+ experience with devs, drivers for games etc. who wins? :) If AMD gets in this race soon I think they can claw their way back up also, but they better hurry. The rest are starting to wake up to the fact that it's all about games (samsung ships gamepads now with top devices, their first demos were with GAMES...LOL), qcom hired 30 devs to show what they can do with their gpus (nothing from these guys yet, but they just hired them early last year IIRC) etc. GDC2013 shows devs massively left consoles for games on mobile/PC (both ~51%, everything else FAR behind as the survey showed from 2013 and 2014 shows).
T4 had no products out there getting benched or announced before shield. But we know K1 is already in devices getting benched. Denver will be inhouse also, unlike Qcom S810 so a gain on battery should be expected that at the least not to mention we already see the dual 2.5ghz matching the quad A15 K1 (2.3ghz). Definitely showing tablet to tablet K1 quad vs. the K1 dual is a very impressive showing for the NV custom in house cpu design. Qcom will be a year late to Custom party this time since they screwed up. So NV joins the custom chips this year (was apple swift, qcom krait), while Qcom drops the ball and goes off the shelf. oops.. I don't see how it's shaping up to be a bad next 12 months for K1 and expect more announcements of products once shield hits next month. As long as they're in xmas products I don't care about much else ;) It should do fairly well and denver will add to that.
MartinT - Monday, June 16, 2014 - link
Nvidia basically quitting the consumer SOC market with Tegra and taking their ball to embedded devices should tell you all about the state of that particular part of their business.Morawka - Friday, June 13, 2014 - link
So this is it, AMD admitting they are giving up on the race to Desktop CPU and Server CPU performance per watt.silverblue - Friday, June 13, 2014 - link
...except there was nothing of the sort to indicate either.TheJian - Friday, June 13, 2014 - link
Well they did say in the slide bleeding edge hurt them and that was on the bad side replaced by language that sure sounds like ZERO bleeding edge chips will come.silverblue - Saturday, June 14, 2014 - link
Morawka was referring to AMD giving up on performance per watt, but the slide clearly indicates that they're not.They're admitting that they cannot hope to be on the same process node as Intel, so they have to focus on getting the best out of what they have. The real telling statement was moving away from high performance products with an emphasis on cores, which - to me - would mean the more agile tactic of creating products with a required number of compute units for a given purpose. AMD have already said that's one of their goals. If you can make more effective use of the hardware on offer, it's cheaper - not to mention far less complex - to reach a specific performance level, meaning if HSA can get traction, it can help mask their performance deficit and help to reduce power usage over more conventional designs.
TheJian - Sunday, June 15, 2014 - link
You'd rather bet on software tricks, while the other guys have the HARDWARE & software tricks. You'll lose as they have been showing year after year. R&D dropping, 6Billion in losses in the last 10yrs, be lucky to break even for the year this year etc. HSA will take years before it's of any financial value. It took Cuda years too (and billions of funding to get it to where it is today) and cuda6+maxwell gets much of the same benefits. Not to mention pascal etc coming with everything on the PCB with super highspeed links for sharing crap. To me moving away from high perf products just means you're shooting for 2nd/3rd because you can't compete for #1 in anything. That's not something I like seeing.Process node? So they're admitting something that we've known for a decade? Wow, news. I don't think that's what they meant. Everyone isn't on Intel's node (yet). That's news?
I get what you're saying, but it reads like a company looking in every direction trying to figure out how to compete. I smell desperation all over this.
Phartindust - Monday, June 16, 2014 - link
I don't see how you could arrive at that conclusion. You do know that AMD has 14nm tech on the way right?http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04/17/samsung_gl...
And that the 295x2 put a smack down on Titan Z:
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/NVIDIA...
Oh, and Richard Huddy left Intel for AMD:
http://www.maximumpc.com/graphics_guru_richard_hud...
C'mon man!
twtech - Saturday, June 14, 2014 - link
I guess AMD really hasn't been competitive in the CPU market for some time, so getting out of a race that they were losing makes sense.The unfortunate side effect to that though is that Intel will continue to set their own pace unchallenged, and so far they've shown that sometimes the pace they select is even too slow for their own good.