Advanced Micro Devices CEO Hector Ruiz is stepping down from the helm of the troubled chip company, and Dirk Meyer is taking over.

Ruiz announced the leadership change Thursday during AMD's second-quarter financial earnings conference call. He will remain as executive chairman, but Meyer will immediately take over as the sole executive leader of AMD. "The time is right to turn the company over to a new leader."

Ruiz announced last year that Meyer was the designated successor to the CEO position, but he also said that he planned to stay on the job through 2008. Amid continued heavy losses, however, it seems the situation was too much for the company's board of directors to bear.

Ruiz praised Meyer as he introduced AMD's third-ever CEO.

"He is a talented business executive who is known to make decisions quickly and just as quickly turn those decisions into action. In short, he is the right leader at the right time for this company," Ruiz said, in announcing his own departure from the executive chair.

Ruiz replaced legendary founder Jerry Sanders as AMD's CEO in 2002, after joining the company in 2000 as president and chief operating officer from Motorola. His tenure was a whirlwind that saw AMD leap from an afterthought among the world's top PC companies to a top player in the chip business on the strength of its Opteron processor, only to slide underwater once again after botching the introduction of a quad-core processor.

Meyer's engineering talents are unquestioned within the chip industry, having presided over several very important processor designs during the last 20 years.

"Dirk is an experienced and prolific engineer with over 40 patents and many chip designs to his name including the ground-breaking DEC Alpha processor," Ruiz said. "He led the design of our industry-transforming AMD64 architecture--and then took the reins of what was then the Computation Products business--doubling its revenue, expanding its customer base, partner and R&D footprint, and changing the face of the microprocessor industry as we know it."

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News source: CNET News.com

Wow, things are looking pretty bad at AMD. For a while I thought, "well, they've been there before and they'll come back again." But now, I don't know.

Early this year I upgraded my mobo and got more memory so I'll be ready when AMD releases a good quad-core. I have been waiting... and waiting...

Of course their Radeon HD 48xx cards look really good. They're finally giving nVidia a tough time. But one thing that has me concerned is physics support. It might not matter much now, but it may in the future. Intel and nVidia bought the two main gaming physics companies. AMD has been trying to license it through Intel. Bad idea.

AMD's move of buying out ATI has really put both AMD and nVidia in strange positions. Things won't continue the way they currently are. There will be changes in the future. But I just hope we don't see Intel entirely dominating the computer industry. I believe that Intel will release a competitive graphics solution in the future, and when that happens, it seems like it would be best if AMD and nVidia could combine.

I'm not a fan of AMD, but I honestly do want them to stick around for the sake of competition.

I agree. With just Intel, things will stagnate and go nowhere once they lose the incentive to keep innovating. Which is true of any company in any industry. I like AMD but I still wouldn't want them to reverse with Intel and end up the sole provider either. I think if they or someone else had been active in the 80's against Intel we'd have progressed further and faster than where we are now. What better motivation to do better than the threat of competition out performing you?

if only this held true for cable and telcos but yea, in the IT field more competition is better. After all, the AMD Athlon 64 is the reason why Intel stepped up it's game. Now with Phenom being the big bust that it is Intel doesn't have anything to worry about other than it's graphics division.