Dave Orton to leave AMD at the end of July

[Tim Murray]

Are we seriously using overclocking results to determine how good a company's products are? Am I on the right forums?

 

[karlotta]

Are we seriously using overclocking results to determine how good a company's products are? Am I on the right forums?

you seem to notice that....

 

[INKster]

Heh, what exactly are you smoking Dizi?

I would say that AMD has shown the same amount of success that Intel has when it comes to refreshes... in fact maybe a bit better? How long was the P4 out before it was replaced by the C2D? 180 nm Willamette was "ok" but certainly didn't outpace the original Athlon which was at 1 GHz and the P4 was at 1.5 GHz... and the Athlon won most of those benchmarks. Athlon XP was able to keep up with the early stages of Northwood. Then we had several years of Prescott to compete against the Athlon 64, which was undoubtedly a faster and more efficient processor and architecture.

So while the original K7 had the weakness of poor chipset and motherboard support, I would say that it and its derivatives were VERY successful. Athlon->integrated L2 Athlon->Athlon XP all did very well. Same could be said about the Athlon 64, though the jump to DDR2 was more about memory changes vs. any kind of radical performance increase (not to mention the addition of virtualization hardware).

Don't get me wrong, I am not a huge fan of Hector, but I think that AMD has performed very well through the years given their competition. Consider that NVIDIA and ATI have had revenues that were pretty comparable to each other. Now consider that AMD typically had 1/10 to 1/8 the revenue that Intel had to work with.

I do admit though, I am very curious why Orton is bailing. Then again, he was struggling with running ArtX in a competitive environment, and then doing the same again when running ATI. That takes a toll on anyone, especially if you are very hand's on and very cognizant of the operation. He's probably going to take his money and take a long breather... until the urge to get back into the industry surfaces again.

Edit: heh, after reading your other post about buying things when drunk, I guess that you were not smoking anything during the previous post. ;P

Yet, while the mostly stagnant desktop market saw the fight between "Northwood"/"Prescott" and "Palomino"/"T'bred"/"Barton" and the K8's, Intel was able to completely grab a hold of the fast rising mobile market with their hidden hero, "Banias" (the first Pentium M), coupled with a clever marketing campaign of the Centrino mobile platform brand.

Why didn't AMD do the same and focus on the market segment which was growing notably faster if they had the best Perf/Watt on the desktop front since the K7, and the K8 was a potential energy saver/PCB real estate saver with the integrated Northbridge and all ?
Poor market insight from the top brass, IMHO.

The signs were all there.
They were carried away by the sweeping success of the Opteron and the Athlon 64 in the server and desktop markets respectively and so, by the time they "woke up" with the "Turion 64" brand, the market was already in the hands of Intel's second generation Pentium M ("Dothan") and the Core Duo/Core 2 Duo.
Too little too late.

 

[dizietsma]

Are we seriously using overclocking results to determine how good a company's products are? Am I on the right forums?

Yes when the company in question had to release an entire new model called the Thoroughbred -B with an extra metal layer to get the damn things to go faster !

People have short memories here and rose tinted glasses when it comes to AMD processors and what state they intially go out the door. That's probably because you are not early adopters or do not overclock, both of which show limitations up quickly.

I'm not saying that the cpu's are bad, it's just that AMD had to spend time getting them to be as good as they were later, so it is strange to claimQAMD has got rid of Dave because ATi has not executed well, AMD don't either

 

[Geo]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20070711.RORTON11/TPStory/Business

In the end, Dave Orton was tired of commuting - and they were long commutes.

For seven years, Mr. Orton regularly flew between his Silicon Valley home and Toronto, where he captained ATI Technologies Inc. through constant industry turbulence before it was taken over last year by Advanced Micro Devices for $5.4-billion (U.S.).

His new job was to lead the integration of the two firms, whose computer chip products were complementary but whose cultures weren't as closely aligned, with AMD more corporate and ATI a bit more freewheeling.

Yesterday, with the job of integration complete, Mr. Orton announced his resignation as executive vice-president at AMD. The decision came after concluding he didn't want to keep on commuting from California, as would have been required because AMD management is headquartered in Austin, Tex.

"For me, personally, it's time to call a time out. There's no other hidden agenda in here at all," Mr. Orton, 51, said in interview. "Being a CEO for so many years, I [still] felt like I could adapt and be a good team player [at AMD] but at the same time that team role required me to get back on a plane and effectively work in one site and live in another. That was the part I just said I'm not ready to continue with."

I think I'm willing to accept that until/unless there is a major cutback of core former ATI staff (i.e. outside marketing/sales/pr/finance) in the nearish future, then I'll go with the other likely reason (i.e. he told his people that wouldn't happen, so he took the bullet first).

If you look at their structure, it's not terribly surprising that he's a fifth wheel, and an expensive one at that. But don't forget the merger was largely a cash deal, so I'm not really too worried about the Orton family going hungry any time soon.

 

[_xxx_]

When the company f*cks up three releases in a row, heads must roll. All the would-be alternative explanations offered above are nonsense.

He led the company, the company didn't do well, he's being nicely offered to leave honorably, end of story.

If I was the head of AMD I would have done this right after the purchase (along with the complete higher management team at ATI as well probably). Staff cuts are also a definite must from the business POV.

Seems like my unfounded prophetic predictions (right after the takeover) of ATI going out of high-end business soon were right once again.

 

[Dave Baumann]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20070711.RORTON11/TPStory/Business

"For me, personally, it's time to call a time out. There's no other hidden agenda in here at all," Mr. Orton, 51, said in interview. "Being a CEO for so many years, I [still] felt like I could adapt and be a good team player [at AMD] but at the same time that team role required me to get back on a plane and effectively work in one site and live in another. That was the part I just said I'm not ready to continue with."

 

[jimmyjames123]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20070711.RORTON11/TPStory/Business

That explanation of his doesn't make sense to me. Let's say that ATI was not purchased by AMD, and it was business as usual for ATI. Orton would still be commuting from California to Toronto, which is even more tedious than commuting from California to Texas.

I think Orton saw the writing on the wall, and for some reason he didn't like what he saw with respect to future prospects at AMD, and he excused himself from the company. It was a good excuse, because now he truly can spend all the time in the world with his family in California, and he surely has boatloads (multi millions of dollars) of money too after all those years as CEO and after the cash buyout.

 

[Speccy]

That explanation of his doesn't make sense to me. Let's say that ATI was not purchased by AMD, and it was business as usual for ATI. Orton would still be commuting from California to Toronto, which is even more tedious than communiting from California to Texas.

And that could be one his personal motivating factors for seeing the deal is done - he get a way out (with, no doubt, some nice wedge in his back pocket).

 

[Fox5]

Or an exec who would resist further butchering of ATI needed to be removed...

What butchering of ATI has occurred?

"Athlon XP was able to keep up with the early stages of Northwood"

made me fall over laughing.

Intel had 3 versions of northwood, A, B, and C, and they didn't launch at 3ghz.
From what I recall, northwood A remained slightly behind AMD, northwood B traded blows with AMD but in the end they essentially equaled out (3200+ matched 3.06ghz in performance), and Northwood C flew away from the athlon xp, for the 6 to 9 months or so until AMD could deliver desktop K8s.

Why didn't AMD do the same and focus on the market segment which was growing notably faster if they had the best Perf/Watt on the desktop front since the K7, and the K8 was a potential energy saver/PCB real estate saver with the integrated Northbridge and all ?
Poor market insight from the top brass, IMHO.

AMD wanted to go high end with the K8, they resisted dropping prices for quite some time and didn't appear to want to go cheap and mobile. That, and they lacked decent mobile chipsets.

 

[3dilettante]

What butchering of ATI has occurred?

Butchering was too strong a word for what has happened so far.
Not too strong for what I expect if AMD's fortunes do not improve.

AMD wanted to go high end with the K8, they resisted dropping prices for quite some time and didn't appear to want to go cheap and mobile. That, and they lacked decent mobile chipsets.

It didn't help that K8 was a server processor first and foremost, and AMD's more narrow product mix and weak marketing couldn't match Centrino.

The IMC was a problem for power draw with integrated graphics, since the IMC kept the CPU out of the deeper power states.

 

[Fox5]

Butchering was too strong a word for what has happened so far.
Not too strong for what I expect if AMD's fortunes do not improve.



It didn't help that K8 was a server processor first and foremost, and AMD's more narrow product mix and weak marketing couldn't match Centrino.

The IMC was a problem for power draw with integrated graphics, since the IMC kept the CPU out of the deeper power states.

It did? I thought even the original k8s were able to downclock to 800mhz, and it was a selling point of the opteron line. I could be wrong though.

 

[Rys]

It did? I thought even the original k8s were able to downclock to 800mhz, and it was a selling point of the opteron line. I could be wrong though.

Yes, they could, but that's different to what 3dilettante's talking about with deep power saving. Memory accesses by the IGP stopped the CPU switching parts of itself off and going completely clockless.

 

[Freak'n Big Panda]

"Athlon XP was able to keep up with the early stages of Northwood"

made me fall over laughing.

Yeah I agree, after Intel first moved to .13nm with northwood the AXPs couldn't keep up at all.

When the company f*cks up three releases in a row, heads must roll. All the would-be alternative explanations offered above are nonsense.

He led the company, the company didn't do well, he's being nicely offered to leave honorably, end of story.

If I was the head of AMD I would have done this right after the purchase (along with the complete higher management team at ATI as well probably). Staff cuts are also a definite must from the business POV.

Seems like my unfounded prophetic predictions (right after the takeover) of ATI going out of high-end business soon were right once again.

I second this.