When we broke the story a few years ago, people laughed. Heck, we laughed at ourselves, too.
Three years later, no one is laughing, and the reasons for doing so are finally playing out.
Today, the two companies are officially one, not separate divisions. The reorganisation will result in 4.1 major divisions, with the 0.1 being finance. The other four are sales, marketing, technical marketing and a combined CPU and GPU division. That last one is the real change, as the first 3.1 will be more or less the same as they were.
This brings up the question of who runs what. CPUs were under CPG, Computational Products Group, and GPUs were under GPG, Graphics Products Group. Randy Allen ran CPG, Rick Bergman ran GPG, together making up the very short list of people who might end up with the combined entity, lets call it CGPG.
In a few hours, Rick Bergman will be announced as running the CGPG unit, and Randy Allen will be leaving AMD.
You could look at this as a takeover of AMD by ATI, and given that Bergman was responsible for the technical unFSCKing of ATI recently, it is a very good thing. The other way of looking at it is that Randy was in charge of the Barcelona debacle, and under Dirk's tenure, people are held accountable.
We haven't heard which viewpoint is the correct one, both may be partially correct, but we will refrain from making any base and tasteless jokes about slipping a dirk in.
In any event, this will hopefully bring an even more technocratic approach to the AMD CPU design, a process that is well underway already. With stronger, more aggressive and technically capable management, things could be looking up at DAAMIT HQ.
The official announcement should go out this evening or tomorrow morning at the latest, but either way, it is a new day at AMD.
Update: AMD officials and unofficials all say that Randy Allen had nothing to do with Barcelona. He was in the server division at the time and not responsible for that level of engineering.