AMD to lose another sales, marketing exec

By Colleen Taylor, Contributing Editor -- Electronic News, 9/4/2007

Less than two weeks after the company's worldwide sales and marketing chief Henri Richard announced plans to leave Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) for a job at another technology company, Rick Hegberg, AMD's senior VP of worldwide sales, has also made plans to depart from his post at the company.

An AMD spokesperson confirmed to Electronic News the reports of Hegberg's departure, which first surfaced Monday on technology blog Fudzilla.com.  AMD has not yet specified when Hegberg will officially leave the company or the motivations behind his departure.

Hegberg has worked for AMD since it acquired graphics chipmaker ATI Technologies for $5.4 billion in October 2006. At ATI, he had also served as a senior VP of worldwide sales.

The departures of Hegberg and Richard have come at a particularly unfortunate time for the company, which is ramping up for the debut of its long-awaited Barcelona line of quad-core processors. AMD's quad-core launch has been delayed several times thus far; originally slated to ship in Q2, then pushed back to an August release date, the processor is now set to launch on September 10. Meanwhile, AMD's rival Intel Corp. debuted its quad-core offering in November 2006.