The leadership shakeup at Advanced Micro Devices continued on Monday with the company appointing Forrest Norrod, formerly from Dell, to run its server and custom chip businesses.
As senior vice president and general manager of the Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom Business group, Norrod will try to turn around a slumping server business. He’ll also be responsible for strategy, development and sales of custom and embedded chips, which are growing businesses for AMD.
He is filling a position formerly occupied on an interim basis by Lisa Su, who was appointed CEO earlier this month.
The EESC is one of two business groups at AMD, the other being the Computing and Graphics group, which deals in PC and graphics chips. The EESC group is gaining more importance as AMD tries to diversify beyond the PC market, which is slowing down. The group’s recent successes include custom chips for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 gaming consoles.
Norrod previously ran the server and data-center unit at Dell and was known for his strong opinions. He adopted ARM designs for testing in Dell servers but was critical of chip delays and software shortcomings related to ARM server processors. The future of AMD’s server business is built around x86 and ARM chips.