Stefan Mileschin

Fabless chipmaker AMD has lost another of its senior executives as chief design engineer Michael Goddard has cleaned out his desk and moved to Samsung.

Goddard's official title was corporate vice president of product design engineering and chief engineer of client products. It appears that he wanted something a little more catchy.

According to CRN, Goddard is now vice president and system architect at Samsung's Austin, Texas-based facility. The move was kept quiet and was only spotted when he changed his LinkedIn profile.

Goddard has been with AMD for 25 years and his exit is being seen as part of the many woes the company is going through at the moment.

There has been an exodus at AMD lately as the company restructures. While this might be considered normal, there are some fears that restructuring cuts and product delays are making it impossible for the company to do its job.

AMD plans to lay off approximately 15 percent of its global workforce, or nearly 1,770 employees, to cut down on its operational costs. But a chunk of these job losses have come from the company's engineering staff.

Now executives are finding that they no longer have enough engineers to do projects effectively and are just going somewhere they can.

Goddard had worked closely with former AMD engineer and CEO Dirk Meyer. He also helped spearhead AMD's design operations in India.

He joins AMD expats, former chief financial officer Thomas Seifert, who also served as AMD's interim CEO for eight months, and Bob Feldstein, former AMD business development executive.

What should be worrying for AMD is that these people are not retiring and falling from the face of the earth. They are taking all their AMD experience to the company's rivals.

http://news.techeye.net/chips/amd-ch...ads-to-samsung