Jim Anderson Leaves AMD For Lattice Semiconductor

Jim Anderson, AMD Senior Vice President and General Manager, has resigned from his position at the chip maker in order to become the CEO at Lattice Semiconductor. Lattice Semiconductor might not be a name familiar to our readers, but they make solutions powered by their own power FPGA, video ASSP and IP products to the consumer, communications, industrial, computing, and automotive markets. Jim Anderson is well known to AMD fans as he was one of the main folks behind the well-received Ryzen Threadripper family of high-end desktop CPUs and the launch of the Ryzen CPU series. In fact, he lead AMDs Computing and Graphics business group since 2015. AMD transformation in recent years has been pretty amazing, so it is sad to see him leave. You can read the Lattice statement about him joining and how they are paying him millions of dollars in stock and incentives to be their President and Chief Executive. It makes sense that he leave after the 2nd Generation Threadripper and Ryzen processors are released and 7nm Radeon ‘Vega’ GPUs are on the way. Those processors have been successfully rolled out and he’s likely help shape future versions of the Zen architecture. AMD should be fine for a number of years with what they have in the works, but it’s still the departure of a key executive that is very well known. Over the past year AMD has seen Raja Koduri (GPU Lead), Jim Keller (Zen Architect), Chris Hook (Marketing Guru) and now Jim Anderson leave.

Here is the bio of Jim Anderson that was still on AMD’s site as of this afternoon.

Jim Anderson is senior vice president and general manager of the Computing and Graphics Business Group. Anderson joined AMD in May 2015. Anderson is responsible for managing all aspects of strategy, business management, and engineering for AMD client computing products and solutions, as well as sales for AMD client and graphics products. He brings to the role 20 years of business and technical expertise, deep industry knowledge, and a proven track record of leading business and engineering teams to drive growth.

Anderson joined AMD from Intel Corporation where he served from November 2014 to May 2015 and completed the acquisition and successful integration of the Axxia processor business from Broadcom Limited (formerly, Avago Technologies) to Intel. Anderson spent the last decade at Broadcom Limited and LSI Corporation in a variety of leadership positions spanning strategic planning, marketing, engineering, sales and general management. Prior to joining LSI Corporation in 2005, Anderson held strategic planning roles at Intel Corporation for mobile/laptop and server processors in addition to serving as a microprocessor architect.

Anderson holds numerous academic degrees, including an MBA and Master of Science in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Master of Science in electrical engineering from Purdue University, and a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota. Anderson has received four patents for innovations in computer architecture. He also serves on the Board of Directors of Qylur Intelligent Systems, Inc.

AMD acknowledged Jim Anderson leaving this afternoon and announced that Saeid Moshkelani, previously client general manager at AMD, will be SVP & GM Client Compute. Saeid is best known at AMD for successfully establishing their Semi-Custom Business Unit as a multi-billion-dollar business and also spent time leading our Product and Platform Engineering Operations to support the launch and ramp of leadership products. From what we gather it was Moshkelani who was responsible for the semi-custom APU wins into the Microsoft Xbox and Sony Playstation game consoles.