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“Technology leadership is all about understanding where the market will go next”, claims AMD Chief Sales Officer, John Byrne. “It's about predicting the future”. KitGuru was fortunate enough to catch up with AMD's CSO – the driving force behind AMD's recent sales resurgence. This interview gave us a unique and interesting perspective on how AMD sees itself in 2014 and how it aims to position itself for the future.
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When Rory Read took over at AMD, as reported by KitGuru in August 2011, wholesale changes were not far behind.
Those changes started right at the very top – with the board.
Read brought together several key people, including:-
- Dr Lisa Su
In from Freescale to head up the global Business Units. - Mark Papermaster
Joined as CTO following successful spells at Apple and Cisco. - Colette LaForce
Brought in from Dell to take responsibility for marketing and – most importantly – the corporation's brand management/thought leadership. - Devinder Kumar
Another crucial part of Rory's new team was the positioning of someone who already had 30 years’ experience understanding how the money moves in, around and out of AMD. Devinder was made Chief Financial Officer to help ensure the most important beans stay counted.
Completing the line-up was the addition of John Byrne, to fire up AMD's global sales effort and make sure that the all-important cash starts to flow through the business.
No matter how well organised a corporation is, it means nothing without sales. When executed properly, it is the ability to sell what you have in your inventory right now, as well as setting up orders far into the future – for what your engineering teams will be developing tomorrow.
“When we took over as a leadership team”, explained Byrne, “AMD was generating 95% of its revenue from the classic PC markets and that was a dangerous place to be”.
“By the end of 2013, that was below 80% and by 2015, approximately half of our revenue will be from growth markets”, said Byrne. “We must and will continue to attack the growth markets we have identified”.
Byrne specifically outlines these high-growth markets as semi-custom, embedded, dense server, professional graphics and ultra-low power client.
Positive words. But let's go deeper.
I’m happy that AMD is making a recovery and I wish it good luck, but it’s a pity that desktop enthusiasts don’t see to be part of the roadmap.
AMD get a lot of stick in the CPU sector, but they offer a lot for budget users. I am sure they will get high end processors out again in 2015 to target intel.
Their GPU’s are very strong this year and have caused nvidia some serious embarassment. TITAN Z for instance? it was delayed after they saw the performance of the R9 295X2.
Heres to the future !
R9 295X2 has been the best video card release ever IMO. I can’t afford one, but the value is actually very strong and the performance at Ultra HD 4K is incredible. First watercooled reference card ever 🙂 CPU’s – been a while since I have owned AMD – Intel are just so far ahead. I think AMD did well from console sales on Xbox one and PS4. must have made them billions already.
AMD totally lost the CPU wars, and the gpu war is also on a loosing side. Although 295×2 is a monstrous gpu, it is far too expensive for most people, only enthusiasts with really deep pockets can get one (or more). From my point of view, a PC enthusiast with a relatively small budget, AMD has basically nothing to offer. Intel cpus trample amds to death, and for the same price, an Nvidia gpu will be overall better performance wise. Console-wise speaking, yeah, they kind of won, but that is not enough to keep them afloat… Let us hope they will have something better to offer in the period to come.
@Wolf…
” Although 295×2 is a monstrous gpu, it is far too expensive for most people, only enthusiasts with really deep pockets can get one (or more). ”
Hmmm… and nVidia’s Titan Z at $3000 is what, somehow a better deal?
295X ATE nVidia’s lunch. So much that nVidia canceled the release.
Alexander Wolheart: Master of the Non-Sequitor.
@ CSO John Byrne
If you atre reading this then when is AMD gong to release multi socket Kaveri?
Twin or Quad APU’s would be a real monster both in Compute performance and graphics.