Fred Weber pushes AMD out of Intel's shadow

Fred Weber, AMD's CTO and vice president of engineering of its Computation Products Group, believes the semiconductor manufacturer is about to step out from under Intel’s shadow. If so, it’s in no small part thanks to his efforts during the past five years as the leader of AMD’s 64-bit development efforts; Weber became CTO in 2001.

AMD’s delivery in 2003 of the industry’s first

x86-compatible, 64-bit processors — the Opteron and Athlon 64 — exemplifies this CTO’s passion of  “innovation within standards.”

“English is a beautiful language because we add to it rather than throwing it away every 20 years for something else,” Weber says, explaining that this philosophy is both a personal and a corporate strategy. “The art of technology is in synthesizing the rules to create something of beauty and utility.”