As a part of AMD's restructuring plan which was announced back in June and which will push AMD to organize in two groups, the Computing and Graphics Business Group and the Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom Business Group, AMD has now appointed Dr. Lisa Su to the position of President and Chief Executive Officer.


After a short four months since Dr. Lisa Su became AMD's Chief Operating Officer (COO), AMD has decided that CEO Rory Read will be stepping down and that Dr. Lisa Su will take the helm of AMD as President and CEO, making her the fifth CEO in the company's history. With the position of COO, Lisa was just below Rory Read so it was an obvious choice and just a single step up.




This also confirms all the previous reports that Rory Read is pretty much preparing Lisa Su for the role of CEO. While Rory Read was never meant to be a "transitional CEO" he was brought to the company in 2011 in order to restructure and stabilize it and push it in the right direction, beyond the traditional CPU and graphics markets. While the company's focus is still on those markets, AMD has since then focused on other designs such as ARM, semi-custom IPs seen in Playstation 4 and Xbox One as well as some other designs that are a part of AMD's ambidextrous plan.

While it is a significant change in AMD's internal company structure, it should have no impact on AMD's future and current product plans since Lisa has pretty much been behind those all along. With Mark Papermaster as the company's CTO, the things are pretty much unchanged.




What makes this news great is that, once again, AMD's helm is in the hands of an engineer, since Dr. Lisa Su holds a doctorate in electrical engineering from MIT and has previously held positions at both IBM and Texas Instruments.

AMD has also noted that while Rory Read is stepping down as CEO, effective immediately, he will be staying with the company in an advisory role until the end of this year.



Source: AMD.com.