AMD changes CEO as turnaround pressure intensifies

Yet after six years as AMD's CEO, the embattled Ruiz stepped down Thursday as pressure mounts on the Sunnyvale-based company to dig itself out of a deep financial hole and recover from a devastating product stumble that wound up benefiting Intel in a big way.

Ruiz, 62, the only person to head AMD other than founder and longtime chief executive Jerry Sanders, will remain on the board of directors. One of the few Hispanic CEOs of a major U.S. corporation, Ruiz had also been AMD chairman but now takes on the title of executive chairman, a distinction that lets him retain some day-to-day responsibilities.

One of his biggest jobs will be to help craft AMD's strategy for slashing its manufacturing expenses, a major concern for any semiconductor company but one of particular importance for AMD as it burns through cash and struggles in a fierce battle with Intel.

He's being replaced as CEO by AMD's current president and chief operating officer, Dirk Meyer, 46, an engineer and chip designer who has been helping Ruiz run the company since 2006. That means he knows AMD's operations intimately but also that he shares some of the responsibility for the company's financial distress.

"I'm not a man of many regrets," Ruiz said in an interview with The Associated Press. "We have a tremendous, talented group of people at this company, and we've gotten AMD to be a true contender. But being a contender and actually winning, we're not there yet. ... This is the perfect time to pass the baton to someone like Dirk."

Meyer had previously led AMD's microprocessor division, the company's primary business unit. Microprocessors act as the brains of personal computers.

Nearly all the world's personal computers and many of the servers inside corporate data centers run on chips made by AMD or its much larger Silicon Valley rival, Intel Corp. Intel commands 80 percent of the global market for microprocessors. AMD has roughly the other 20 percent.

Meyer was involved in the design of AMD's Opteron server chip, which marked the company's 2003 foray into a lucrative segment of the server market where Intel had a stranglehold. The success of that chip--and Ruiz's sales savvy in lining up new customers--helped AMD transform itself from a perennial second-fiddle to Intel into a serious rival across all computing platforms.

But the semiconductor industry is notoriously volatile, prone to boom-and-bust cycles. AMD has crashed hard over the past two years, racking up billions in losses and struggling to regain the competitive edge it squandered against Intel.