Vinod Dham Quits Amd

Vinod Dham, one of the main developers of the Advance Micro Devices (AMD) flagship K6 computer chip, has left the company.

Dham, 46, a top executive at AMD in Sunnyvale, California, has resigned for personal reasons, company spokesman Scott Allen said. He resigned and the company accepted it.

Dham, the Indian American vice-president of the computation product group, ran much of the operation of K6, a chip introduced earlier this year to take on Intel Corporation and its Pentium processor in a $20 billion microprocessor market.

AMD and investors had pegged the companys recovery to the K6, a chip that processes numbers about as fast as Intels top-of-the-line offerings but costs about 25 per cent less. In an earlier attempt to develop the K5, a fifth-generation chip, AMD had already lost $1 billion in sales.

 

So far, K6 sales have been less than expected and AMD has reported two quarters of disappointing financial results. It is widely believed that K6 sales have been slower because of production problems and reluctance by big personal computer makers to alienate Intel.

AMD would not specify why Dham resigned, but news reports had speculated earlier that Dham might be forced out because of K6s slow start. Dham could not be reached immediately for comments.

He was one of the designers of the Pentium at Intel in the early 1990s and also managed the 386 and 486 microprocessor product lines. He became one of the principal executives at Nextgen Inc, a start-up company that was developing chips compatible with the Pentium. AMD bought Nextgen two years ago to speed up the development of its own Pentium-class chips.

After the K6 was launched in April this year, it was regarded by experts as the first true challenge to Intels dominance in the X-86 architecture. The launch of K6 had an immediate effect, with Intel slashing prices on its Pentium chips by 57 per cent, prompting AMD to trim prices by as much as 55 per cent.

Born and raised in Pune, Dham moved to Delhi for his high school education and earned a bachelors degree in electrical engineering and electronics from the University of Delhi. In the mid-1970s he headed for the US and received a masters degree from the University of Cincinnati.

Allen of AMD said that Rob Herb, vice-president of strategic marketing, and Larry Hollatz, vice-president of the Texas microprocessor unit, would take over Dhams role.