In recent news, Advanced Micro Devices, the biggest rival of Intel has just announced the hiring of a former Intel data center executive. The new AMD employee will lead the cloud business for the chipmaker’s EPYC processors in an attempt to take more server market share away from its top competitor, Intel.
This information was confirmed to CRN by AMD itself as it hired Lynn Comp, a 22-year Intel veteran, as corporate vice president of the Cloud Business Group. She will report to Dan McNamara, another Intel veteran who has been leading AMD’s Server Business Unit since the beginning of 2020.
“Lynn comes to AMD with more than 20 years of experience in the data center, IT infrastructure strategy, and product planning, and will be a key member of the EPYC leadership team as we continue to expand our cloud business.”
AMD hired Comp just a few months after the departure of Vladimir Rozanovich, who was AMD’s corporate vice president for mega data center and cloud sales. Rozanovich left AMD to become the president of Lenovo’s North America business. Since then AMD has also hired Citrix veteran Brad C. Smith as corporate vice president of cloud sales.
Coming back to Lynn Comp, she was a vice president within Intel’s Data Platforms Group and general manager of the Visual Infrastructure Unit. She has to her name the task of “pioneering and incubating” the first discrete GPU for data centers using Intel’s Xe architecture.
She also worked as a senior director in Intel’s data centre communications team, where she worked on sales enablement for communication service providers on 5G and virtualized network deployments.
Miles Ward, CTO at SADA Systems, a Los Angeles-based cloud-native solution provider, recently told CRN that AMD has been working more closely with his company.
“AMD is just much less mature in these kinds of motions. It doesn‘t have any of the kinds of teams that we’re talking about. [The company doesn’t] have the optimization people at the middle, let alone the cloud people that would help translate it, let alone the programs people that would try to convert [this work] into relationship structures.”
But he also stated that AMD has been making steady progress in the cloud infrastructure market. As we know, AMD’s EPYC CPUs will be powering more than 400 cloud instances by the end of the year, which includes a new class of virtual machines that Google Cloud.
“Users that need confidential compute are invariably selecting AMD because that‘s the only chip type that is important for that.”
