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A Chip That's Worth a Wait
Its flagship product was delayed, and its fight with Intel continues. But for AMD's leader, it's all good.
 Imaginechina AMD's Hector Ruiz (right) on a recent trip to China. |
Sept. 17, 2007 issue - Until recently, Hector Ruiz's tenure as CEO of Advanced Micro Devices was a Cinderella tale. As a student struggling to learn English, the Mexico-born Ruiz walked across the border each day to a Texas high school, and graduated as valedictorian. He earned a doctorate in electrical engineering at Rice and, after stints at Texas Instruments and Motorola, joined AMD, a chip company that was a perpetual also-ran to the industry leader, Intel. After he became CEO in 2002, AMD grabbed market share and established a reputation for innovation and quality. AMD further boosted its status by buying the graphics company ATI last year for $5.4 billion. But in 2007 AMD has logged losses as it failed to ship its long-awaited "quad-core" product, code-named Barcelona. The chip is now shipping, and Ruiz, 61, was more than happy to talk about it.
LEVY: What will be the impact of the Barcelona release?
RUIZ: We entered what people call the enterprise space—these really high-end users of servers and workstations—in 2003 with Opteron, and Barcelona is the next step. It's the same infrastructure, so customers will find it very easy to migrate. It brings a number of advantages in performance per watt, virtualization and other things, so we believe it's going to strengthen our position in enterprise.
It was originally scheduled to be released months ago. Why so late?
We would've loved to have been earlier, but it is just a very complex technology. We're the first company in the history of the world to actually be able to put four very complex processors on a chip, and it just took us longer than we thought. I believe that those people who are disappointed that it's later than usual are going to be delighted and forget about [the late arrival].
After a few great years AMD has had a couple of rough quarters. How do you bounce back?
My ability to get [my team] to stay in focus is made a lot easier by the fact that these are the right people. We have 16,000 employees, and they all can see beyond the valley of the shadow. Considering our last two [unprofitable] quarters, the employee morale is pretty high.
You've filed a massive suit against Intel charging anticompetitive practices. What do you hope to get from that?
It's incredibly important for us to feel confident that Intel will stop the illegal abuse of its monopoly. We would like to feel that consumers have complete freedom to choose products based on their performance and the value of the product and the quality of the product, and not in any form of coercion or illegal tactic in preventing AMD from successfully entering the marketplace. [Editor's note: Intel says that its business practices are lawful and fair and is fighting the suit.]
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