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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Petz who wrote (25931)	11/13/1997 7:06:00 PM
From: Maverick	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1582684

Advanced Micro Devices' Dham resigns SUNNYVALE, Calif., Nov 12 (Reuters) - Advanced Micro Devices Inc. said on Wednesday Vinod Dham, one of the top executives responsible for the company's flagship K6 computer chip, had resigned for "personal reasons." "The best way to phrase it is, he resigned and the company accepted it," said Scott Allen, AMD spokesman. Dham, group vice president of the computation product group, ran much of the operations related to the K6 -- a chip introduced earlier this year to take on Intel Corp. and its Pentium microprocessor. AMD and investors had pegged the company's recovery to the K6, a chip that crunches numbers about as fast as Intel's top-of-the-line offerings but costs each about 25 percent less. So far, K6 sales have been less than expected and AMD has reported two quarters of disappointing financial results. AMD would not specify why Dham resigned. But analysts speculated he was forced out by Chief Executive Jerry Sanders because of K6's slow start. For the past week, there had been speculation Dham would shortly leave the company, analysts said. "Basically Vinod has a pretty strong personality, having been so many years at Intel, and Jerry (Sanders) doesn't have many strong personalities around him," said David Wu, analyst at ABN AMRO Chicago Corp. Dham could not be reached immediately for comment. Dham was one of the designers of the Pentium at Intel in the early 1990s. He became one of the principle executives at Nexgen Inc., a small company that was developing chips compatible with the Pentium. AMD bought Nexgen two years ago to speed up the development of its own Pentium-class chips. AMD introduced the K6 in April in a bid to get a bigger slice of the $20 billion microprocessor market from Intel. But so far, K6 sales have been slower than expected because of production problems and reluctance by big PC makers to alienate Intel. AMD's Allen said Rob Herb, vice president of strategic marketing, and Larry Hollatz, vice president of the Texas microprocessor unit, would take over Dham's role. ((--Kourosh Karimkhany in Palo Alto, 650 846 5401))