AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) announced late yesterday that Forrest Norrod, formerly Dell’s VP & GM for Server Platforms would be joining the company to take Lisa Su’s position which she had left vacant after ascending to the position of CEO. That puts him in charge of AMD’s entire Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom business unit (EESC) as well as managing all aspects of strategy, business management, engineering, and sales for AMD’s EESC business.

Forrest Norrod comes from over 10 years of working at Dell and having valuable enterprise and server experience, where AMD needs it most. What will be interesting to see is how he will help shape AMD’s future enterprise and server businesses in ways that will set them up for success, because as it stands right now they are in an awful place in terms of server market share and overall sales. Thankfully for Norrod, AMD is already building ARM server chips and shipping them to customers and is working on new ARM and x86 core IP as well, which should give him and his team even more ammunition, come 2016.

Forrest Norrod – AMD

The truth is that Norrod has a long road ahead of him and there’s no doubt that he’s a qualified person for the job, it also may result in AMD having a closer relationship with Dell and getting more AMD products inside of Dell’s own servers.

After all, AMD currently has quite a good relationship with HP, but that hasn’t been enough to get them serious amounts of enterprise design wins to the point where they could actually gain some market share. It is going to be a very big uphill climb, but it really seems like Su has picked the right man for the job and now we just have to see where it will go from here.

“Forrest is an industry veteran whose strong track record of establishing and growing businesses strengthens our leadership team. Forrest’s unique combination of engineering,” Su said in a press release about the new hire. “Business management and technical expertise at both the chip and system level make him ideally suited to lead AMD into an expanded set of markets where our differentiated technology assets provide a competitive advantage.”

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When Khronos had originally announced OpenVX and the associated APIs, there was a lot of excitement about how it could help simplify and unify computer vision within the industry. That announcement was merely the establishment of the working group and the companies that would contribute to the standard’s development and finalization. With today’s announcement, however, OpenVX officially becomes an industry standard that can be commercially deployed within products and developed for immediately. This finalized and ratified OpenVX 1.0 version brings a laundry list of features that help abstract the underlying computer vision interaction with hardware in order to make cross-platform implementations more possible.

Keep in mind that OpenVX is an API abstraction that makes implementing computer vision easier and more vendor agnostic while also giving more tools to improve performance and optimize power consumption. The target goals are to help bring mobile SoC vendors as well as embedded vendors to bring more refined computer vision implementations to their customers and make developing for computer vision more universal as well. OpenVX helps take prototyped OpenCV implementations and turn them into finalized products that can ship into whatever market they are targeted towards, OpenVX is designed to bring production quality computer vision to these vendors and their customers.

OpenVX Companies

Since the announcement of OpenVX and the finalization of OpenVX 1.0 as a standard, the number of companies that have joined the working group have also expanded and may actually help give you an idea of who is interested in utilizing computer vision in their products as well as who will have a more developer-friendly environment. Also, the spec itself has not changed since the original announcement, but rather now there are conformance tests available in order to ensure that certain implementations of OpenVX are interoperable between vendor implementations and adhere to the standard. Also, since the original announcement, there are now two implementations of OpenVX that prove the design, one being a Khronos sample implementation that will be available opne source by the end of the year, and another from Nvidia that is already working in the alpha phase as part of the VisionWorks vision SDK.

Unfortunately, one company missing from the OpenVX working group is Apple, who is a member of other working groups like OpenCL and actively utilize standards like OpenGL in most of their products. It is a little concerning that they aren’t part of the list of companies involved with OpenVX as computer vision becomes ever more increasingly important to mobile and embedded computing. Not to mention, most of Apple’s competitors are already involved with OpenVX and there’s a very good chance that this could give those companies the leg up on Apple in terms of computer vision implementations. There is still a chance that Apple could simply use OpenVX without officially being an ‘adopter’ or a member of the working group through their GPU relationship with Imagination, and hopefully that will be the case, but at the same time there’s a very strong chance that they could be developing their own computer vision technologies and may once again diverge from the rest of the industry.

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ARM (NASDAQ:ARMH) today announced its new mbed IoT device platform which consists of three parts, primarily focused around software and software enablement. The goal of this platform is to take away from the complexities of building an IoT solution using an ARM Cortex-M processor.

ARM wants to help the IoT growth by allowing people building IoT devices to focus on unique features and differentiation rather than spend most of their time on how their silicon will work with an OS and how it will interact with other silicon.

The first, and biggest part of this new mbed IoT device platform is the inclusion of a free mbed OS for ARM Cortex-M processors. The OS already has built-in security, communication and device management features in order to enable quality and efficient IoT devices. The mbed OS already has built-in support for countless communications standards including 2G, 3G, CDMA and LTE as well as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Smart, Thread, 802.15.4/6LoWPAN as well as HTTP, TLS/DTLS, CoAP, MQTT and Lightweight M2M. It will be available to key mbed partners this quarter and in devices in 2015.

This operating system should theoretically be more lightweight than some other IoT embedded operating systems and mbed should help unify the countless ARM Cortex-M products under a single OS. Currently, ARM has six different Cortex-M class processors in their product line, which means that with the mbed OS they can effectively and easily scale in almost any type of embedded IoT device imaginable. This announcement follows the company’s recent announcement of their most powerful Cortex-M processor, the Cortex-M7.

Another reason why this mbed IoT platform is so important is because ARM’s licensees are churning out Cortex-M processors faster than anyone could have imagined. Since 2005 alone over 8 billion Cortex-M-based chips have shipped. Out of that 8.6 billion, 4.6 billion of those took place in the past 18 months alone. This means that something like this was absolutely necessary from ARM’s perspective to make their platform to continue to be the platform of choice of IoT as they have Intel and Imagination breathing down their backs.

The second part of the mbed IoT platform is the mbed device server which is a licensable software product that ARM is offering to customers to help connect and manage devices. ARM claims that this will help provide a bridge between different protocols and APIs used for IoT used by developers. It effectively serves as a receiving end software platform for IoT devices for cloud services and the like. It also is designed to reduce the complexity of device and application management by eliminating the need for duplicate infrastructure for clients and servers.

Last but not least is the mbed.org website which will serve as a community to unify the more than 70,000 developers around the mbed platform. The website will serve as a repository for software components, a comprehensive database of hardware dev kits, reference apps and documentation. The community is already quite large and will enable ARM’s community to latch on and grow with it, creating an even bigger and more powerful community as a whole.

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So, AMD announced that they would be reshuffling the company’s corporate structure which includes some business unite consolidation and executive shuffling. First and foremost, they would be appointing Dr. Lisa Su as the COO from her current position as Senior Vice President and GM of Global Business Units. Anyone that knows how AMD works and what Dr. Lisa Su has been doing already knows that she’s effectively been the COO for quite some time and that the company had actually vacated that position a long time ago. Keep in mind that AMD’s current CEO, Rory Read, was once COO of Lenovo before he came from IBM (which is where Lisa Su spent most of her career before she worked at Freescale).

So, that point is merely nothing more than a technicality. Now, there have been a few organizational adjustments made within the company as they’ve consolidated the entire company into two divisions.

AMD will have a Computing and Graphics Business Group as well as an Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom Business Group. This effectively separates the professional and consumer graphics divisions as well as the consumer processors from the server processors. AMD’s current CSO, John Byrne, will be made the Senior Vice President and GM responsible for leading the entire division and will report directly to Dr. Lisa Su.

Now, for the Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom Business Group, the company will have Dr. Lisa Su herself as the acting lead of the division. This includes AMD’s server, embedded, dense server and semi-custom businesses (consoles), it also includes the related product engineering and sales functions necessary for these various businesses.

There have been rumors within AMD that the company would be grooming a new CEO to replace Rory Read, their caretaker CEO. Rory Read has done exactly what he was brought on to do, keep the company stable, and more importantly, alive. We’ve been hearing rumors that John Byrne may be one of the front runners for the CEO position, which makes sense with today’s announcement even though he was already CSO. And Lisa Su’s role within the company already groomed her for the position and her involvement in the company’s public events further makes this seem plausible.

Dr. Lisa Su (center) pictured along with John Byrne (left of her) and Colette LaForce (to her right) at last week’s Computex 2014

However, there is no denying that the constant presence of both John Byrne and Lisa Su at company announcements and launches is without a clear sign that the job for CEO is effectively between the two of them. This is why I believe AMD has decided to split the company up in two and has essentially given each of them a chance to show who of them is more capable of making AMD a successful company.

One weird thing that AMD did was mention the ages of everyone involved including Rory Read (52), Lisa Su (44) and John Byrne (43), which even further clarifies that this is more of a CEO race than anything. However, some investors and members of the board may be concerned that Lisa Su and John Byrne may be ‘too young’ to run the company even though they are clearly the two most qualified people to do so. It just adds another drop into the CEO race bucket.

I honestly didn’t see it coming down to this, as normally the CEO position is mostly politically battled from within the halls of the companies in question. If this is indeed the board of AMD’s way of giving each of them a chance to show their stuff, they may have just telegraphed it to the entire world and we will probably be able to pick the next CEO of AMD purely based upon the performance of these two divisions of AMD over the next year or two. Until then, we’ll just have to keep watching. These changes will be reflected starting July 1st.

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