AMD product lead Rick Bergman jumps ship for another company
updated 04:55 pm EDT, Thu September 22, 2011
AMD's Bergman leaves for elsewhere
More executive swaps were in store Thursday after AMD said that its Products Group General Manager Rick Bergman had left the company. He was quitting to "pursue a new opportunity," the company said. AMD's fresh recruit from Lenovo, new CEO Rory Read, would temporarily take over the group while it looked for a replacement.
It's not evident who had hired Bergman. As a minor concession, AMD was taking on Paul Struhsaker to head up a new Commercial Business group handling embedded and server technology.
Bergman was a Senior VP at graphics chip maker ATI before AMD acquired the company in 2006. As such, his experience is most likely to apply to related companies like NVIDIA. Intel could consider him a candidate as its emphasis on much faster integrated graphics in Ivy Bridge and beyond could use Bergman's experience.
AMD, meanwhile, risks losing a manager who played an important role not just in advancing Radeon graphics chips but in helping to develop Fusion, its blend of processor and graphics in a single core. The design is key to getting entry-level desktops and notebooks that can still outperform some Intel counterparts just through sheer graphics power.
