AMD Announces Senior Leadership Changes

By Nathan Kirsch January 25, 2019

At CES 2019, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) made headlines around the world thanks to the keynote by AMD President and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. Today, AMD is once again making headlines because they have announced multiple organizational changes to help strengthen the company’s senior leadership team and to help continue growth.

Some of you might remember John Byrne who had a great career at AMD that ultimately saw him becoming the Chief Sales Officer before departing for Dell in July 2015. The CSO roll at AMD has never really been filled to our knowledge, but that changed today when Darren Grasby was promoted to become a senior vice president and chief sales officer for the company. Darren Grasby was previously senior vice president of global Computing and Graphics sales and president of AMD operations in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). He’ll be busy in 2019 as AMD has a ton of new products coming out! AMD Radeon VII video cards with 7nm GPUs, 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen desktop processors, AMD EPYC ‘Rome’ 7nm datacenter processors based on Zen 2, 2nd Gen Ryzen mobile processors are just some of the products coming out this year.

That is just one of a handful of key senior positions at AMD that had leadership changes today. Sandeep Chennakeshu is now the executive vice president of Computing and Graphics. Forrest Norrod, senior vice president and general manager, Datacenter and Embedded Solutions Group, will now control both CPU and GPUs for datacenter products. And the final change is that Mark Papermaster has been promoted to executive vice president and CTO.

AMD will unify all sales operations under Darren Grasby, senior vice president and chief sales officer. Grasby will now lead the global sales and go-to-market activities across all product lines, channels and regions. Previously, Grasby was responsible for worldwide sales to PC manufacturers and channel partners.
AMD has hired industry veteran Sandeep Chennakeshu into a new position as executive vice president of Computing and Graphics responsible for the companys high-performance PC, gaming and semi-custom businesses. Chennakeshu brings extensive semiconductor experience, a deep technology understanding from a systems and software perspective, and extensive general management experience. He has spent the last 30 years serving in multiple senior engineering and executive roles at Ericsson, Freescale, Sony and Blackberry.
As the datacenter business continues to grow in importance for AMD, Forrest Norrod, senior vice president and general manager, Datacenter and Embedded Solutions Group, will now have responsibility for all AMD datacenter products across both CPUs and GPUs.
AMD is promoting Mark Papermaster to executive vice president and CTO in recognition of his leadership in driving the technology vision and roadmap execution of the company.

AMD hopes that these senior leadership changes will help drive innovation and sales for years to come. It also shows that AMD wants leadership positions that push a synergy between CPUs and GPUs!