AMD announced today that it has finally selected a new leader after taking an unusually long time to search for a replacement. The new President and CEO is Rory P. Read, who previously was the President and COO of the PC maker Lenovo. He takes over from Dirk Meyer who left the company last January. Thomas Seifert, who was working as AMD interim CEO during most of 2011, will now return to his previous position at AMD as CFO.
Read previous worked at IBM for 23 years before the company decided to sell off its PC business to Lenovo. Read moved over to Lenovo when the sell-off happened and helped to lead the company to "double-digit revenue growth and market share gains" according to AMD"s press release.
AMD is currently still locked in a battle against its two biggest rivals; Intel in the PC processor space and Nvidia in the graphics industry. AMD has been making some small inroads against Intel lately in selling more processors thanks in part to the launch of its new Fusion chips that merge the CPU and GPU onto one chip. The company is still working on some big CPU chips for PCs, including one code named "Bulldozer" that is due out later this year. It is also working on a 10 core chip, code named Piledriver, that"s due out in 2012. However, it looks like AMD is going to stay out of the growing smartphone business with a company exec saying earlier this year that AMD has no plans to make smartphone chips for now.