The chief executive officer of Advanced Micro Devices, Hector Ruiz said in an interview that he had no plans to announce his resignation in 2008. The interview, which is scheduled for broadcast on the same day that AMD holds a meeting with financial analysts, may indicate that the current team of executives is still confident about the success of the company.

Mr. Ruiz confirmed in an interview with CNBC Europe that the current team of top execs at AMD sees Dirk Meyer, who is currently president and chief operating officer, as the next chief executive officer for the world’s second largest x86 microprocessor vendor.

“We started doing [the succession planning] four years ago and I’m delighted that Dirk is a strong player. When the time comes for me to hand the reins over to him, it's going to be fantastic,” Mr. Ruiz is reported to have said.

Hector Ruiz joined AMD in January 2000 as president and chief operating officer, just months after AMD released its first AMD Athlon central processing unit (CPU) that helped the chipmaker to seriously challenge market leader Intel Corp. and stop to be a supplier of low-end microprocessors. Hector Ruiz was named chief executive officer in April 2002, just a little ahead of AMD’s launch of AMD Opteron and Athlon 64 processors, which have been outperforming rivals from Intel for years. He was appointed as chairman of the board in April 2004. Despite of the fact that the successor of Mr. Ruiz is known already, the current CEO, who turns 62 on the 25^th of December, has no plans to announce resignation in 2008 and currently has no schedule of his resignation to publicize, he said in the interview.

“I can’t tell you that, but it’s not any time soon. Not next year,” Mr. Ruiz reportedly said.

While under the rule of Mr. Ruiz AMD managed to increase its market share rather considerably from about 18% to approximately 23%, the key technologies that helped AMD to transform into a leading CPU maker from an underdog – HyperTransport, K7 and K8 micro-architectures – were developed under the supervision of the previous chief executive and the founder of AMD, Jerry Sanders. But Hector Ruiz could not fix several fundamental issues that AMD has always had. The ramp up of new processor micro-architectures has always took a considerable amount of time at AMD and the delays of chips based on K10 micro-architecture with up to four processing engines is a good proof of such issues. Additionally, transitions to new manufacturing technologies have also been slow at AMD. Finally, AMD’s acquisition of graphics and multimedia chip developer ATI Technologies has yet to confirm its viability as the new company has not achieved profitability in its first year; instead, it lost massive amount of CPU, graphics, multimedia and set-top-box revenues of both ATI and AMD along with $1.6 billion.

The interview will be broadcast on Thursday, December 13 at 23:00 Central European Time (22:00 GMT), the same day that AMD holds its financial analyst conference in New York. An e-mail including excerpts of the interview was sent to Reuters news-agency on Tuesday and was confirmed as authentic by CNBC.