Whitebox: Interviews

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) last week unveiled a performance upgrade for its Athlon 64 X2 dual-core high performance processor, the 6000+, with a clock speed of 3 GHz and 2 MB L2 cache. AMD has also disclosed plans to release desktop chips later this year based on the quad core design code-named Barcelona. Division marketing manager for desktop at AMD, David Schwarzbach, discussed the moves in an interview with Patrick Thibodeau.

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.

After seven years in retirement, Geoff Anson decided to return to the IT industry as Palm's A/NZ sales director. In the past 12 months, he has re-shaped the vendor's distributor line-up by signing exclusively with Ingram Micro. His mission now is to develop Palm's partner relationships.

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.

Coretech was a successful whitebox builder for many years but was forced to evolve as that market disappeared. Co-founder, David Wain, talks to ARN about education, storage and hot laps in V8 Supercars.