PC and Components: Interviews

Graphics chip and chipset vendor ATI Technologies aims to have half of its revenue come from the consumer electronics market in the future, according to the company's president and chief executive officer, Dave Orton.

It's been one year since Lenovo Group announced plans to acquire IBM's PC division and the enlarged company is now looking to aggressively expand its share of the worldwide PC market. As part of this effort, Lenovo is gearing up to introduce its own brand of PCs to the US and European markets, most likely starting with a line of desktops for small and medium-sized business (SMB) customers.

As vice president and general manager of Intel's Mobile Platforms Group, Anand Chandrasekher was the executive who led the company's Centrino charge. Now he has a new challenge: leading Intel's global sales organization.

Rambus Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Harold Hughes hopes his company's name won't always remind the memory industry of black-robed judges and endless pages of court filings.

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.

Best known for its graphics chips, Nvidia is moving to make other parts of the computer motherboard, even if that means occasionally competing with larger companies like Intel, according to Jen-Hsun Huang, Nvidia's president and chief executive officer.

Advanced Micro Devices’ Dirk Meyer has presided over many chip development teams. But as senior vice-president of AMD’s Computation Products Group, lately his job has meant more time spent in front of airport security screeners than processor designers as he travels around evangelising AMD’s eighth-generation Opteron and Athlon 64 processors. One year after Opteron’s introduction, Dirk Meyer was talking it up for a group of financial services customers. Whilst there, he took some time while to talk to Tom Krazit about the progress of Opteron from the breathless hype of the pre-launch marketing to the steady progress the chip has made with server manufacturers and customers in the enterprise world over the past year.

Two hundred Intel employees gathered on the front lawn of the company’s Californian campus last week to mark its 35th anniversary. There they buried a time capsule containing, amongst other things, an Itanium 2 processor, chopsticks donated by Intel’s Malaysian subsidiary, and a copy of Time Magazine featuring Intel co-founder and Chairman, Andy Grove, on the cover.