Hector was a bit of a mug. But he made by far the two most important decisions in amd history. The acquisition of ati and spin off of gf. In hindsight it's pretty clear amd wouldn't be here today without the spinoff and I doubt amd would be here without the ati acquisition due to the nessecity for the console deals.This is when the passionate talented CEO can make a huge difference. Huang at Nvidia is exactly like this and I think Lisa Su is also.
Strangely enough, roles have reversed. Grove at Intel was of that caliber, while Ruiz at AMD was the opposite.
It's like Royal rule. When you have a great king, they can cut through the bureaucracy and speedily implement changes. Of course the disastrous exact opposite can happen with a poor ruler. If she stays, expect more of the same leadership. By the way, money while necessary for R&D is way overrated as the sole or even main ingredient. An adequately funded, small, talented team can do previously unimagined wonders. I've seen it happen in other fields. Genius & passion goes a very long way.
Intel is like what IBM became. The perfect corporate partner, attractively boringly predictable for the fortune 500 CEOs and hedge fund investors. I'm not a young person, but it's obvious that a lot of legacy CEO types even though they try to speak the language, are clueless to the speed of modern ideas & innovation.
He was strategic and visionary like something we havnt seen since and before imo.
That said he obviously have not the competence to drive forward the core business like Lisa. He left amd without a good CEO to take over and he was a crook.
If the game numbers from zen 2 is accurate it means the latency is under control. Rome will be extremely popular. In the years forward amd will pour money into tsmc. Apple nv whoever. It will be more and more clear why the gf spinoff was right and Intel will have a far more difficult time ahead than people imagine. This is far far far worse than p4 time. The market dynamics of gf spinoff and separate io core will lead us somewhere it's even difficult to imagine.