Following last month's resignation of its CTO Phil Hester, microprocessor challenger AMD has promoted Randy Allen to head its computing solutions group, forming a central engineering organisation, to be co-led by veteran engineering executives Chekib Akrout and Jeff VerHeul.

The appointments come as the Sunnyvale, California-based company re-architects its business for sustained profitability due to the departure of Mario Rivas, formerly executive VP of the computing solutions group who has left AMD to pursue new opportunities.

"We are accelerating AMD's transformation, reshaping the organization and bolstering our management team to lead in our x86 microprocessor and graphics businesses. Placing experienced leaders in new, more focused roles will enhance our execution and progress towards sustained profitability and long-term success. The creation of a centralized engineering organization aligns and focuses AMD's world-class engineers and intellectual property portfolio on the strong business opportunities in front of us," explained AMD president and COO Dirk Meyer, in a statement.

In his new role as senior VP of AMD's computing solutions group, Allen reports to Meyer and is responsible for the development and management of AMD's broad and growing portfolio of consumer and commercial microprocessor solutions and platforms.

Allen, a 24-year AMD veteran was most recently responsible for the company's server and workstation business and previously oversaw microprocessor engineering for the company, including the Opteron and Athlon 64 processors.

The newly formed central engineering organization will be co-led by Chekib Akrout, who is joining AMD from Freescale Semiconductor, and Jeff VerHeul, corporate VP of design engineering at AMD, and is tasked with directing the development and execution of AMD's technology and product roadmaps in partnership with AMD's business units, reporting to Dirk Meyer.

Akrout joins AMD after serving as VP of design technology at Freescale, prior to which he worked at IBM, managed the development of a wide range of products including microprocessors, ASICs and mixed signal devices, and was responsible for IBM's work on the development of the Cell processor, the Xbox 360 processor for Microsoft, and embedded PowerPC cores.

VerHeul joined AMD in August 2005 after a 25 year career with IBM.

AMD also promoted Allen Sockwell to senior VP of human resources and chief talent officer responsible for developing AMD's leadership assets and employee talent, due to the departure of Michel Cadieux, formerly senior VP and chief talent officer.

In other AMD news, the company rolled out what it says are the industry's first energy-efficient x86 server processors with four processing cores and an integrated memory controller in a 55-watt ACP thermal envelope, aimed at blade and rack system applications.

AMD said the quad-core Opteron HE processors were designed to help data centre managers who see power consumption and virtualisation as the keys to solving their overall performance equation.

As such, the processors contain AMD's advanced power management and virtualisation innovations for power-conscious datacenter managers.

Quad-core AMD Opteron HE processors are available in both the 2300 and 8300 Series for two-, four- and eight-way rack servers and blades.

By Ann Steffora Mutschler, Senior Editor - Electronic News

See also: Electronics Weekly's focus on microprocessors, a roundup of content related to x86 microprocessor technologies and developments.