Rory Read named new CEO of AMD

The search for a new CEO to lead AMD has been long, but the role has now been filled by Rory Read who will have to show strong leadership to achieve the company’s new objectives

Since the departure of Dirk Meyer in January 2011, a few days after the CES 2011 show which demonstrated the strong position held by NVidia in the mobile processors field with their Tegra family, AMD has no longer had an official CEO.

Dirk Meyer, who managed to correct the company, didn’t really see the mobile processor market exploding - leaving AMD behind others (like Intel, although the world’s largest microprocessor manufacturer is already attempting to correct this mistake), with the company no longer believing that he was the right man to lead the company in this new context.

Thomas Seifert, the group’s financial director, took over the role of interim CEO while the board of directors looked for a new manager. Numerous candidates were approached, but the role of moving the company’s culture forward at the same time as redesigning their computer processors for mobile devices led to a few difficulties in finding the right man.

Six months later, and AMD was still without a CEO. This still wasn’t overly worrying to shareholders, even though a company operating without a manager is a little unorthodox. In the current context, with the difficulties already being well known to any potential CEO, the board of directors didn’t want to act too quickly and instead decided to search high and low for the ideal man (or woman) to take the reins by the end of the summer.


Rory Read moves from Lenovo to AMD
The quest is now almost over as AMD has announced that they have found the person they are looking for - Rory Read has been named as the groups new CEO, leaving his current role of director of operations at Lenovo Americas.

After being put back on the right track by Dirk Meyer, the new director will be charged with leading AMD into new markets, with processors aimed at mobile devices and, who knows, the mobile universe in the long term.

Thomas Seifert will continue in his role as financial director while Bruce Claflin, president of the board of directors who has been acting as an executive during the search for a new CEO will return to his normal role.