A nice-looking guy. He looks like a promotion manager.

Should we worry about his exodus? I really do not know. He is of those who were responsible for current awful AMD products.

Either AMD is on the brink of a total disaster/bankruptcy, Rory Read is doing a full clean-up of the entire company and is in the process of assembling a brand new management team or this is just a coincidence of so many managers getting more lucrative/more opportunistic job offers in the industry. Hmmm....

"The changes come as financial pressures mount on AMD and other suppliers to computer makers. In July, the company reported dismal second-quarter results and said the weakness would continue into the current period as the chip maker is hurt by softening consumer demand for PCs, particularly in China and Europe. Rival Intel Corp., which has generally fared much better lately, also recently warned that third-quarter results would be below expectations.

Mr. Read overhauled AMD's top-management team, which now includes Lisa Su and Mark Papermaster, senior vice presidents who both had lengthy tenures at International Business Machines Corp., as did Mr. Read.

Some managers subsequently left AMD as result of job cuts, while some people in its engineering ranks have taken jobs at competing companies. In a positive development, AMD recently said it hired John Gustafson, a well-known technology leader at Intel, as senior fellow and chief product architect for AMD's graphics business unit." - Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/art...04578004391711280364.html

Something tells me Read is just assembling his own new AMD, but investors are being very nervous and cautious given the current state of affairs at the firm.

I sure don't want to see $400 Intel Core i5 or $800 NV GPUs though, so I am hoping this exodus of executives leaving is not a signal that AMD is on its last legs.

This is a changing of the guard that happens in most corporations when a new CEO comes in and needs to make wholesale changes to get the company back on track.

Contrary to the technically inaccurate comments above, (and there are many)... AMD products are not "awful" at all and AMD is not going down. Morons have been predicting the demise of AMD for 40 years and they still make money and keep producing excellent products. In fact AMD wins more new vendor model builds all the time so at least the purveyors of PCs, laptops and e-toys know AMD delivers excellent products even if many PC enthusiasts are clueless.

AMD currently leads in ULV and laptops and has very competitive and price advantaged products in all other PC market segments so the only place they are going is up. VIA and other's have tried the X86 market and AMD is the only one capable of competing and winning against Intel, long term.

What many enthusiasts fail to comprehend is that only 5% of the PC market purchases the top of the line, over-priced speed demon CPU/APUs. The rest of the market buys the products AMD is producing because they deliver all the performance that 95% of consumers need/desire and at great value. Dollar-for-dollar AMD delivers as good or better performance and that is why system builders buy AMD. The only reason Intel is able to maintain it's illegally gotten industry monopoly is because of it's installed base.

The majority of Intel's sales are not the over-hyped, over-priced, top-of-the-line CPUs, they are the bread and butter CPUs sold to mainstream consumers. Having the fastest CPU is primarily for bragging rights as few consumers need these and even fewer are willing to pay the absurd prices. All current X86 CPUs run PC's just fine, contrary to the foolishness spewed by the technically challenged and fanbois.