Dirk Meyer (computer scientist)

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Derrick R. "Dirk" Meyer (* 1961 in La Grange (Illinois) ) is an American computer scientist and manager . From July 2008 to January 2011, he was Chief Executive Officer of the semiconductor manufacturer AMD .

Meyer graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a bachelor's degree in computer science and received his master's of business administration from Boston University .

From the mid-1980s onwards, Meyer worked at DEC for 10 years and was involved in the development of the first alpha processors 21064 and 21164.

He joined AMD in 1996 as Director of Engineering , where he led the development of the seventh generation of processors, the K7 . In 1999 the K7 was launched under the brand name Athlon and stopped AMD's financial slump at the time. The Athlon and its underperforming twin Duron have won 80 awards for their processor architecture . With the Athlon, AMD had the fastest processor for PCs on the market until 2002 .

In January 2001, Meyer Group became vice president of AMD's newly formed Computation Products Group . This group and its CTO Fred Weber were responsible for the development of the eighth processor generation K8 , which was launched under the brand name Opteron . He has a 64-bit - x86 architecture called AMD64 , later known as EM64T also from Intel was acquired.

On January 23, 2006, he became President and Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the entire AMD group. Prior to this, Meyer had been COO of the Microprocessor Solutions Sector (MSS) since 2004 and was responsible for all microprocessor development at AMD, including embedded systems and consumer electronics .

In 2008 Meyer replaced Héctor Ruiz as CEO of AMD. Meyer focused the company on the PC business and the server market . More than 100 notebooks with AMD chips should come onto the market in 2010. Meyer wanted to turn to the mobile and consumer goods business only when AMD could provide sufficient resources for it. For 2011 and 2012 he relied on the Bulldozer architecture for the core business and on Bobcat for the energy-saving processor market, which is almost exclusively dominated by Intel.

On January 10, 2011, he resigned from his positions at AMD.

Individual evidence

  1. AMD: Ready to play ball , CNN Money, August 30, 2010
  2. Jürgen Kuri: AMD boss Meyer gives up , heise.de, January 11, 2011
  3. AMD Appoints Thomas Seifert as Interim CEO; Dirk Meyer Resigns in Mutual Agreement with Board of Directors