Saeid Moshkelani to depart too

Another prominent name we heard is leaving AMD, but so far, it hasn’t been announced. Saeid Moshkelani, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Client Business Unit is on his way out too. One should see Saeid as Herkelman’s pier, and they both reported to Bergman. Unfortunately, I never had the chance to meet Saied as for the past few quarters, AMD has sidelined us from events and has an agency that sends us emails and keeps us in the loop.

Jack Huynh takes over

Jack Huynh, just like Saied, has a semi-custom background and he was leading the PlayStation and Xbox efforts. Before he got the new gig, he previously led the AMD semi-custom group as senior vice president and general manager. I never met Jack, so I am sure he was good in his previous job and one can hope he can do well in leading the CPU and GPU going forward. Once a company brings in a new business unit leader, it usually results in the departure of people who were doing that job before. AMD has been known for doing that often and often bringing new people in, instead of promoting within, with some exceptions. I’ve been following them for more than 25 years now and have met most of the people mentioned above.

Struggle with designs

One thing that came to mind that AMD keeps missing is “go to market” with the notebook. After decades of trying, things are getting better, but apart from a few interesting designs, the major batch of profitable designs ends up coming from the house of Intel. Imagine how hard it is to excite OEMs and System integrators if AMD is still struggling. The fact that the Phoenix CPU, announced at CES 2023, was almost nowhere to be found for months after launch didn’t help.

The desktop was quite competitive for the last few years with some possible downturn in the future as Intel is getting its execution back, and graphics was lagging behind Nvidia but was, for the most part, competitive. Herkelman, who became a public face of Radeon Graphic, proved the importance of public appearance, and so did Shrout and Rob Hallock, who previously was the face of Ryzen for 12 years and now works for Intel.

Let’s hope for AMD’s sake that this change will result in a desirable outcome, but from the outside, it looks messy.