Henri Richard had been a media frontman for AMD as it rose in prominence in the last decade.Henri Richard, the former chief marketing and sales officer with Advanced Micro Devices, is joining Freescale Semiconductor to lead the chip makers sales and marketing divisions.
Richard, who will hold the title of senior vice president, will join the Austin, Texas, company later in September, according to a statement released Sept. 5.
On Aug. 22, Richard announced that he would leave AMD after working as the chip makers top salesman since 2002. During those five years, Richard also worked as one of AMDs top spokesman as the company looked to take market share away from the much larger Intel.
"Henri is a respected veteran of our industry and I am glad he has chosen to join the Freescale team," Michel Mayer, Freescales chairman and CEO, wrote in a statement. "His expertise in developing customer solutions will accelerate our growth initiatives and build on Freescales strong market position."
Richard left AMD, which is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., as the company prepared to release its much anticipated quad-core Opteron processor #151;"Barcelona"—within the third quarter of this year. The company has a press conference scheduled for Sept. 10.
Click here to read more about Barcelona.
Freescale, which makes microprocessors for cars, cell phones and network products, went private in 2006 for $17.6 billion. For years, Apple used the PowerPC processors co-developed by IBM and Freescale for its Macintosh computers before announcing a switch to Intel chips in 2005.
Recently, Freescale joined IBM and several other vendors, including Samsung, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing and Infineon Technologies, in a new partnership to develop microprocessors for a wide range of consumer products, handheld devices and supercomputers.
These companies plan to jointly develop microprocessors that will be built on a 32-nanometer manufacturing process that will use CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor), a process for manufacturing processors. The agreement also calls for the development of processor design kits to support that technology.
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