Stories by: Robert McMillan & Tom Krazit

The last five years have not been easy for Hector Ruiz. As Chief Executive Officer of Advanced Micro Devices, he has presided over some tough times at the Sunnyvale, California, chipmaker. Formerly in charge of Motorola's semiconductor division, Ruiz took the helm at AMD just as the PC industry entered into a major slump. But after racking up well over US$1 billion worth of losses over several money-losing years, his company finally turned things around in 2004. With the launch of its first dual-core Opteron processors last week, AMD has the jump over its rival, Intel's server chips, an area where AMD has been slowly gaining marketshare over the past years.