AMD is not doing that well financially, but it looks that worst is finally over. Relaunch of Opteron Barcelona in B3 revision, B3 quad cores and B3 Tri-cores didn't prevent Phil Hester, AMD’s Chief Technology Officer from resigning.

No one really knows the reason why he is leaving, the official line is that he wants to try new things; but we suspect that this has something to do with the tough decision to fire 10 percent of his company.



K10 was late and in 65nm that turned to be a disaster for AMD's quad-core, at least until the last weeks of Q1. The situation looks much better in Q2 and onward, but it was not enough for Hester to stick around with the company.

We have strong reasons to believe that from this point on things will get better at AMD, but before this can affect the revenues and profits, the company will have to fire 5 percent of people now and an additional 5 percent until Q3. We are talking about 1,650 people and their families who will be heavily affected by AMD’s road to recovery.

After all, Hester knows that Intel has never been stronger, at least not in the last ten years, and it will be a tough job to fight Intel. AMD is getting better but Nehalem and some future products look like tough competition in 2008 and 2009.

We wish Phil Hester all the best in his future carer.