AMD on Wednesday promoted five of its executives to higher positions in a bid to honor their achievements and support the company’s long-term growth goals. Indirectly, the promotions demonstrate the company’s current growth opportunities that are considered as top priority for now. 

“Our high-performance products and long-term roadmaps have placed AMD on a significant growth trajectory,” said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO. “Aligning and expanding our senior leadership team around our highest-priority growth opportunities will continue the momentum we have built across our business in 2021 and beyond.”

Three people that got promoted to senior vice presidents are directly responsible for CPU, GPU, product technology architecture, and technology as well as product engineering. All of these activities are tremendously important as AMD is about to start executing multiple strategically important projects and initiatives, including those focused on upcoming CPU (Zen 4, 5), GPU (RDNA3, CDNA2), and interconnection (Infinity) architectures; next-generation chip packaging; and Xilinx integration. Promoting people ensures that they stay with the company, which is crucial for timely and predictable execution. 

AMD’s new senior vice presidents are:

• Martin Ashton — SVP of Graphics Architecture and Radeon Technologies Group Intellectual Property (IP) — has been leading development of graphics processor architectures and IP for gaming, datacenter, and mobile products, since 2018. Previously he worked at Intel and at Imagination Technologies. 
• Mark Fuselier — SVP of Technology and Product Engineering — is responsible for foundry technology end-to-end engineering of new products. Essentially, he is leading AMD’s manufacturing operations.
• Sam Naffziger — SVP, Corporate Fellow and Product Technology Architect — has spent decades developing CPUs at AMD and Intel and whose most recent achievements are AMD’s chiplet architecture as well as low-power features. Today, his focus are product technology choices for the best power/performance/area combination to maximize product competitiveness, efficiency, and cost.

Executive Vice President Promotions

In addition to promoting its technology executives, AMD also promoted two of its business leaders, who will also get a pay raise:

• Darren Grasby — EVP and Chief Sales Officer — has been leading AMD’s sales since 2007. As a result of Mr. Grasby’s promotion, AMD boosted his annual base pay from £410,000 to £450,000 (or $561,700 to $616,500), and increased his target yearly bonus opportunity from 100% of his base salary to 125% of annual base salary.
• Devinder Kumar — EVP and Chief Financial Officer — joined AMD in 1984 and has been the company’s CFO for over eight years. Devider Kumar will also receive a pay raise from $580,000 to $625,000 per year, whereas his annual bonus opportunity will increase from 100% of annual salary to 125% of year base salary.

As AMD will begin absorbing Xilinx in the coming quarters, so it will be important to ensure consistency in its business team execution, which is why it seems to be the right time to promote CFO and CSO.

Pay Raises for CTO and C&G Leader

As well as promoting select officers, AMD also increased base salary of Mark Papermaster, Chief Technology Officer of the company, from $625,000 to $675,000. Also, the company increased annual bonus opportunity of Papermaster and Rick Bergman, EVP of Computing and Graphics Business Group, from 100% of their base salaries to 125% of their annual base salaries.