Rick Bergman Resurfaces...as the CEO of Synaptics
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 28, 2011 8:43 PM ESTLast week I regrettably posted that AMD's Products Group GP, Rick Bergman, had left the company for unknown reasons. Tonight I got an email from Synaptics telling me that Rick Bergman has been named their new President & CEO, effective immediately.
This could shed some light on Rick's reasoning for leaving AMD. For a person in Rick's position, especially at a company that didn't have any intentions of selecting a CEO from within, the move makes a lot of sense. Synaptics as a company could use someone of Rick's talents. With a number of touchpad products, Synaptics now has the challenge of moving into an age where touchscreens are quickly becoming the norm.
Hopefully this means there isn't mass exodus of key talent from AMD and just a single, although quite important, person pursuing a good career opportunity.
Source: Synaptics
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Beenthere - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 - link
I mean really. Meyer was dismissed because he and the board disagreed on tablets and portables. Bergman quit because he got passed over for the CEO position. That's a whopping two people who have left. Yes they are talented, successful people but so is Rory Read who was just hired. I expect he'll be hiring more talent also.silverblue - Thursday, September 29, 2011 - link
Perhaps you're right, however if a small bunch of engineers leaves, how would we ever know without pestering John Freuhe about it (along with everything else)?Mishera - Sunday, October 2, 2011 - link
I found this interesting article a few days ago:http://semiaccurate.com/2011/06/22/amd-and-arm-joi...
I'm not sure how much of it is true, but at very least it way clear with bobcat that Amd way aiming to enter a mobile market, and probably had a better architecture than intel for it. I personally think it's really not up to Amd or Intel or even Apple and Amazon on the future of tablets and x86, but rather Microsoft and their windows platform.
What happened wasn't just a disagreement on portables, but a chair who doesn't understand the industry seeing the market favor mobile computing ad their company with no mobile computing products. It was an irrational descision that probably made Amd unstable again.
It's unfortunate because with every major departure over the past few years at Amd, there followed a bleeding of talent at the company. I imagine an environment like this is hard to sustain at very least because of the instability it creates. A very bad Move on the chair's part. at very least they fired a good manager, and at most they may very well have taken from us a very intriguing possible future for chip architecture.
zhangqq - Monday, October 31, 2011 - link
http://ygn.me/bTf7p