AMD appoints Lisa Su chief executive amid ongoing business shake-up

Dr Su takes over leadership role just months after becoming chief operating officer

Chipmaker AMD has announced that chief executive Rory Read is to be replaced by Dr Lisa Su, just months after the latter was appointed chief operating officer.

The move is said to be part of the firm's continuing effort to reshape itself to meet the changing landscape of the IT industry.

Announcing the move, AMD's board of directors said that they felt Dr Su's expertise and proven leadership in the global semiconductor industry made it an ideal time for her to head up the company.

Dr Su joined AMD in 2012 and was previously responsible for global strategy, marketing and engineering at chipmaker Freescale Semiconductor.

She was appointed as chief operating officer in July, as part of a major reorganisation of AMD's corporate structure that consolidated all its business units into two groups: Computing and Graphics; and Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom.

As part of the latest move, Read is stepping aside as president and chief executive, but will support the transition in an advisory role and remain with the company through to the end of 2014, AMD said.

Commenting on her appointment, Dr Su said she looked forward to building on AMD's strengths to drive sustainable and profitable growth.

"I am deeply honoured to have this opportunity to lead AMD during this important time of transformation," she said in a statement.

"Our world-class technology assets combined with the incredible talent and passion of the AMD team provide us with a unique opportunity to shape the future of computing."

AMD said it has made significant progress in financial and operational performance over the past three years, after previously seeing its profitability eroded thanks to aggressive competition from Intel in the processor market.

AMD has been targeting new industry sectors for its products, such as the nascent market for ARM-based servers.

Last week, AMD demonstrated the Hadoop big data platform running on an ARM-based Opteron server during a session at the JavaOne Conference in San Francisco.

Its ARM-based server processors are still slated to launch before the end of this year.