Former ATI CEO leaves AMD

AMD has just announced in a press statement the departure of Dave Orton, the current Executive Vice-President of Visual & Media Business. This is a sudden move for which we can only guess the reasons after the buyout of ATI by AMD. However, it is strongly possible that there was a falling out between the former CEO of ATI and AMD hierarchy or even that this was planned to in order to simplify the hierarchy and finish the integration of ATI into AMD.

Thus, the management of the Consumer Electronics and Graphics divisions, which were formerly under the control of Dave Orton, will now report directly to the CEO, Hector Ruiz, whose management and strategy are under fire at this moment.

Dave Orton and Hector Ruiz, making official the buyout of ATI by AMD.
With the departure of Dave Orton, although sometimes criticized (notably in this bit of news following a surreal press conference at the Computex), AMD loses a valuable leader. This combined with other previous firings and the strong possibility of another large lay-off, doesn’t suggest good things for AMD, whose last GPUs weren’t too convincing and with future CPUs that will be late in addition to performances that are lower than expectations.