We’ve managed to confirm something that we’ve suspected for a long time. The former AMD CEO, Hector Ruiz, was actually quite a good leader and has managed to achieve many milestones and his famous Opteron success. The biggest problem of this great ex-Motorola manager was that he didn’t know how to lead the company that failed to impress the world with K10, Barcelona/Agena products.

AMD was simply lost and didn’t have any alternative other than to duck under the table and await the arrival of 45nm products which were supposed to fix some things. Nvidia has a similar problem, as they lost dramatically to ATI’s Radeon 4000 series, but luckily for this green company, Jensen, the company’s CEO, has survived NV30, the biggest storm of his life, and he can probably lead Nvidia back onto the graphics performance throne. It will be a tough fight, as ATI has some great people behind the graphics business, but Nvidia is a nasty competitor, which is something that definitely makes our job interesting on a daily basis.

Dirk is the new-old blood in the company and this ex-DEC / Alpha engineer will certainly understand products much better than most other managers; and he has a great opportunity to shine in the months to come. He also inherits a disadvantage of having two fabs to compete with Intel’s six fabs and billions of marketing and R&D money, along with the worst economic crisis in the last seventy years.

AMD’s job is to innovate and discover a piece of the market where it can make its living and we believe that Dirk Meyer might be the man for the job. We hope Hector can find his place in The Foundry Company.