Hector Ruiz steps down as AMD CEO
By Darren Murph 
posted Jul 17th 2008 5:56PM
posted Jul 17th 2008 5:56PM
[Thanks, nehemoth]
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Saw this one coming.
I second that, I just didn't see it in him to lead this company, bring back Sanders.
yeah...wonder if he'll end up getting a 50+ million severance package...stupid CEOs make way too much, even when they drive companies into the ground
First Motorola and now AMD? This guy is a professional corporate wrecker!
Well I think it was about damn time. I also think he has to have SOME shame since he bowed out after the big loss amd had for the quarter.
ATI purchase + Intel waking up must've hurt.
This is a shame really, not that one individual CEO hits the bricks, but that this is a sign that AMD still struggles. Be you an AMD or Intel fanboy, no one should doubt that competition ultimately benefits the consumer. Less competition.... and Intel will be less driven to deliver innovation as quickly, or at least not as aggressively priced.
You're a moron - this doesn't mean "less competition." Hopefully this means they oust that jackass that's been belligerently running that company for the past few years and they put somebody competent in his place. AMD really needs to be reinvigorated. My last 3 computers have had Intel chips, and I'd really like me to actually look at the competition for my next one.
AMD hasn't been any of Intel's competition for years now. If Intel gets lazy then some competitor will open shop to take the consumer demand for faster processing power.
AMD is in the toilet, so it's good when the CEO leaves. That's a chance to get the company back on track and competing against Intel.
Ok so AMD didn't see the whole power savings thing coming, but it's been 5 years now since the Centrino platform was introduced and AMD is still struggling to compete. With ATI in their pocked they should be producing killer mobile solutions - they should have a big advantage over Intel in the high end laptop market. But look where they are now...
Hopefully they will take his salary and put it towards R&D.
It's a sad sad day for the two AMD users in the world..
Yeah but how about the bajillion 4850 and 4870 owners?
Well I'm proud to say im one of them.
That must make me the other one.
How big of a moron are you? AMD owns 1/5 of the market.
And I'll be the undisclosed third.
No matter what AMD goes through, I will always respect them and their products.
Does that make me a fanboy? Meh, I don't know.
Man, i like AMD
Then be happy that this cancer has been excised. Good riddance.
And after helping to run AMD into the ground, how much does he get for walking away and not having to worry about the company anymore? How much are his stock options worth? Does he return any of his bonuses?
When AMD was successful in the K8 times this guy was a genius. Now he's the evil guy who ruined AMD.
Yes
@broli
No, he was still a fool when he came in as CEO in 2002, you see the problem in your thought and everyone elses thought is that a product is attributed directly to the time when someone is in power.
Ruiz would have had to have been pushing to develop the K8 at least 3-4 years prior to his appointment, it's not like companies wake up one morning and go "lets get this next gen processor designed and out the door by next December" I mean heck like 6 years ago both Intel and AMD were talking about experimenting with THz frequencies through gates, nothing close to a full chip but just the ability to form material and find frequency that could do it. The R&D in these companies goes back for ages and people neglect to give credit where it is due. Right now the AMD K10 is basically his legacy including the TLD errors and limited clock speeds and power consumption ratings.
He was always the evil guy who ruined Motorola and now AMD, he lacks the vision and common sense that other people apparently have, seeing as letting your CTO just walk out is probably the worst play I've heard of, pretty much ever. I mean why push technology when you can just stagnate and die.
Glad they finally dumped the tool, maybe they can restore some order to the company now.
Good ol' "Hector The Sector Wrecker" couldn't hold up at AMD either, eh?
Man, no love lost there, I'm sure.
must've been the crappy suit
http://www.engadget.com/2007/12/14/amds-finanical-woes-dont-stop-hector-ruiz-from-nabbing-a-raise/
Indeed, I remember that.. What a bunch of crap.. I hate CEO's who make millions.. If I were a CEO I would take my 300k and be happy!
No, you wouldn't. You'd be as greedy as all of them, 'cause ultimately you'd only think of one person - yourself. Today's CEOs just spend 3-5 years average in their position. Who wouldn't act like them?
It's in the responsability of the Board of Directors to act against such behaviour, but since today's Boards all consist of former employees and buddys of those CEOs, why should they care?
We live in crazy times...
I think AMD is on the right track.. They are doing a lot of good.
will be an adviser for intel by the weekend
According to one of my friends, AMD is about to be bought out.
She said her dad was a lawyer for the other company, but refused to say what company it was :\
wow carl, you're, like, only five degrees removed!
Thanks for the insider trading, Carl. I'm sure the Feds wont be knocking on your door at all.
Apparently AMD is about to be bought out by some other company.
One of my friends said that her dad works for that other company, but refused to say who it was :\
Sounds like some solid info, Carl.
Apparently Carl is about to post this for a third time
so says my cousin's brother's incestuous lover's babysitter
Thanks for the insider trading, Carl. I'm sure the Feds wont be knocking on your door at all.
If i'm not mistaken, it's not insider's trading unless YOU act on it. For him, it's a leak of sensitive information.
My deranged uncle's psychitrists' hobo boyfriend's mother's cat told me that the world was going to turn inside out in less than 0 seconds
Sorry, it didn't post the first time, or so i thought. Then, immediately after posting the second time, the first one showed up.
Actually, this is the second time i've had to send this comment.
I'm not saying that they're definitely going to be bought out, I'm just saying that that's what I've heard. Take it as you will. if things continue as they are, losing money, eliminating jobs, I wouldn't be surprised to see it happen.
They CANNOT be bought out because all the patent cross-licensing agreements that they have with Intel have a poison pill in them: if AMD gets bought out, all the license agreements go away. End of processor manufacturing from both companies. Not going to happen.
Thanks for your huge insight and expertise Carl. "And in other news AMD's stock price is rapidly falling. Turns out some hot shot lawyer on a gadget blog drove everyone into a panic leaking details that AMD is going to be bought."
Who said I'm a hotshot lawyer? I'm just saying that's what i heard.
And if what Jason said is true, then it's not going to happen. Ok, then I was wrong, the world will keep spinning. I put it out there as conjecture, not as a fact.
the healing begins......
we hope
hey MotoSPS i'm an sps worker in uk
Ran into Hector and Darl this afternoon. Appears that Darl is concerned that AMD might not go through with their wise acquisition of their company. Darl told Hector that with his insight into business, he'd always have a job at SCO. But later Darl noticed that it was 300K and 30K that Hector wanted, and tried to skirt the issue.
My bets on blackstone buying AMD, check out motorola since hector e.g. popi: protection of proprietary information
Whatever happened to people thinking about buying AMD? Did they just give up?
I don't think any company was ever seriously considering a takeover of AMD. It was more of Intel fan girls spreading FUD. I could be wrong, but that's how I felt towards the situation.
Reporter: Krusty, why are you deciding to retire now, and not 10 years ago?
/classic simpsons quote.
Wow, that's two companies that have "benefited" from Mr. Ruiz's business acumen...or lack thereof.
So long, Hector. Don't let the door hit you in the a** on the way out.
AMD cannot retain their x86 license if purchased. I can't imagine anybody wanting all of that debt with no license.
Intel will re-license....without AMD or another competitor...they are wide open to anti-trust allegations....and besides isn't Intel using the AM64 instruction set as the basis for their Intel 64 instruction set? So it seems to me that would be a major bargaining chip to get re-licensed for x86...
Maybe when AMD goes under, they can take Motorola with them.
Hey, they're right next door to each other now (Freescale anyway).
"Finally..."
This man almost single-handedly ran Motorola into the ground, I'm surprised it took him this long to do the same with AMD.
I heard he got deported ...
i heard you're a dumbass
Yes, every South American is illegally in the country.
:biggest fucking rolleyes ever:
that was lame...
Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
ha.. what a dumbass. i knew you were just another useless fucking hick racist from your last comment. glad you outed yourself.
and no, i'm not mexican or even latino you rotting piece of excrement.
Wow, way to be relevant to the site, kid. Are you just jealous because someone took your lawnmowing job so now you're back to delivering papers?
this is expected..he had all of those undeserved raises too..
It was time, no cause he was a bad admin if cause everybody was claiming his head.
Overall when you announce that your will doing some serious shift when you change the head the message arrive clearly to everyone.
When you have nothing intelligent to say, one can always fall back on insulting someone's looks or calling them gay... or of course just spew out some sort of racial slur trying to be cute. Oh, and you threw in a sexist comment for good measure. Let's see, you're forgetting:
-mama insults (mine's dead, so that should be an easy one for you)
-size insults (sorry I'm not fat, but I am short, so that should help)
-Mac user insults - it's silly to let me have my own opinions and preferences, after all
-to call me 'dickless' - that's always fun
-successful single woman insults - gotta come up with more than some silly 'work at home Web designer' schtick... sounds like you're a little bitter, though, so I can let you slide there.
Also, feel free to pick on my haircolor, the fact that I wear glasses, or the fact that I am white. I'm sensing that my straightness isn't as fun for you, so knock yourself out there too.
Remember, this is the same moron who said Intel is a useless and innovation-free company. Good riddance, maybe AMD'll pull its head out of its ass now and work on making some useful products.
Don't kid yourself, the last 10 years of innovation in x86 processors has been strictly AMD, Intel just follows and profits off a stronger brand image. They have more money to blow and can sell chips at much lower yeilds as well, allowing them to get step up to the higher nm process and still be profitable.
Hahaha, no. Even if that were true, and it's not (Intel contributes gargantuan amounts of their research to a mutual tech share between itself, AMD, and I believe a few other companies, and very rarely receives anything they can use themselves), the guy said almost verbatim that Intel has developed no useful technologies over the course of their entire lifespan.
Hmm, who came up with USB, PCI, AGP, PCI-E, ATX, the first single-chip microprocessor, the advent of consumer multi-core systems, and for years before AMD even existed edged out every other processor manufacturer in the home consumer market? Even if Intel was riding AMD's coattails on the x86 architecture, saying that they've invented nothing and are a worthless company is one of the stupidest things I can imagine a tech CEO saying. It's like someone saying "the US is just profiting off of all the inventions from Mongolia and claiming them as their own."
The guy's done nothing but hurt his company and bring them from holding the superior architecture (but not on it's own merits, only because Intel dropped the ball on P4) to being dangerously close to failing outright, and I'm glad to see him go so AMD can finally catch up.
I stated in the last ten years. Who got rid of FSB, invented native dual core chips, 64 bit processors compatible with x86, the on die memory controller, etc. Intel used to be an innovator but now they're mostly a follower.
Also, its not like those pci/apg/pci-e/usb were the only buses around. Other companies just failed at appealing to a mass market like intel could. Oh, and look at what a success BTX was.
The K10 architecture is still the superior architecture, they just can't get fabs making bellow 45nm chips, clock/clock the chips are pretty on par.
Get off the internet, you stupid sack of garbage.
pwfletcher is a shining example of why one should have to take and pass a competency test before purchasing a PC.
I'm sure he (she?) regularly attempts to save the entire internet (its easy, just press Alt+F4) to his HDD before turning off his PC so as not to lose his witty comments.
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa ... someone said something politically incorrect. My whole day is ruined. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.
Grow a pair ladies.
Who do you think would win in an internet fight? pwfletcher or Ocean/clak?
I like AMD and have an AMD X2 system, but they sooo mess up the 4 core and had nothing to challenge the Core 2 Duo, they better get cracking on a new desktop CPU and die shrink or they are stuffed. I now have an Advent 4211 (Intel Atom 1.6GHz) because AMD dropped the ball on low power CPUs too!
Good riddance. Don't forget to let the door hit you on the way out.
Now maybe AMD will start getting somewhere near even remotely challenging Intel's dominance.
AMD made excellent achievements (back in 2002) in entering vertical markets and receiving the endorsements from very high profile companies in each respective sector (even when they still did not have Tier I Professional Sys. Skus). The technology was awesome. But, a company infiltrated internally with bad, bad colleague politics will ultimately only have one path and thats down.
Wish them all the best but AMD is its worst enemy!
Can't wait to see that severence package.
Even after driving the company into the ground and laying off god-knows-how-many people, he will probably pocket tens of millions.
aka Hector the Disector
"...An Intel-only world would be boring and certainly not offer the excitement we have seen in the past two years." wrong - make that the last 10 years !!! and BTW, the last 2 years have been utterly depressing for AMD -not exciting especially not for Consumers'.
wow, I just found out about this now, I thought Hector had been quite
a FLOP for the last few years, but I didn't think he would abandon ship so soon. -Captain -your are NOT Hector.
anyway, its kinda funny to see Tom's Hardware snooping around the national-enquirer BORED-rooms for some scoops.
Hector YOU are a Coward:
Well thanks to some extremeley riske' decisions Hector "Ruin"ed almost
completely AMD. Did they really need ati just to stick a video chip on their MB's,?
sure, but maybe working with nVidia, AND (helping ATI out to compete against nVidia) would have been a lot cheaper, and SMARTER than a 6 Billion dollar Bloe-jobbbb !!! mmnm sooo DUH, whats the other "real" reason you suddenly want to resign now Heckky-baby ? eh?
Regarding nVidia and ATI, heres what AMD should heave learned:
"...Keep your enemies close, but your freinds closer..."
Instead, Hector turned one enemy into 2, on both fronts', Intel and nVidia. -what an adhole. -6 Bills would have brought his new Opteron classes into 45nm range well over a year ago now. And then, dozens of times, he kept forecasting the WRONG future date launches of almost every product. Hector may have been ok in a quiet development environment but when faced with extreme competition head-on he turned into BOZO The Clown. "...'at a boy hector !!! " what a LOSER !!!
He was more interested in pursueing his nobel peace prize than he was running one of the most importantly competetive corporations in the world !!!
AMD should have known better "Protect your main weapon (their CPU's) from attack first" -before you decide to expand your territory.
He single-handedly put AMD back into 2nd place (errr now last place) -there is nuthin' good about that. I'm not even a stock-holder -I feel sorry for those poor slobs.
No, instead of Hector's accomplishments he should go down as the most suicidely dangerous CEO that AMD ever had or hopefully will ever have.
and no, I don't care that he is a mild-mannered-nice guy, 'cause we all know where they finish unfortunately.
-the fact that he is "technically" resigning proves he's also a COWARD, leaving the company instead of putting in the overtime himself to help "right" this great ship and undo his mistakes -ahhh Heck "too little too late eh ?"
Unless Meyer can re-vitalize and re-innovate AMD's hardware development lustre he will end up inheriting Hector's own demise, and then his "ASS"et will "Smart" allright ! -he will be guaranteed that.
Soooo can you really do this Dirk? or are you gonna be just another "Jirk" Dirk ?