{mosgoogle}Phil Hester joined AMD in last September as AMD's new CTO, replacing Fred Weber at this position. Hester worked 23 years at IBM at several positions (including CTO of the PC division and VP of the RS/6000 hardware development), leaving IBM to launch Newisys in 2000, a company dedicated to build servers based on the Opteron CPUs, later acquired by Sanmina-SCI in 2003. In this exclusive interview to Hardware Secrets, Hester talks about AMDs plans, strategies, new CPUs and a little bit of his professional life and experience.

What products is AMD currently developing that you can talk about?

I break this answer down into two major categories. The first is products for the PC market as we know it today. The second category is products for emerging opportunities, and in particular, emerging information technology devices for developing geographies.

In the traditional PC area we have products under development that are going to be optimized for the notebook, the desktop, and the server space. And there are common themes across all of those around power efficiency, price performance, reliability, and scalability. We also will be applying virtualization and security technologies across all three of those product areas. But obviously the implementation of a product in those areas is tuned for that particular market segment. For the mobile market we are optimizing for low power, lower-cost devices; we’re focusing on power efficient devices in the desktop space, and on scalable, power efficient, highly available designs in the server space.

Besides the traditional markets, AMD also has initiatives for new opportunities in the information device area, particularly around developing geographies. This includes the 50x15 initiative, which says that we want to see 50 percent of the world attached to the Internet by the year 2015, and are developing exploratory products that would be best suited for different markets to try to achieve that goal. So things like the PIC, or Personal Internet Communicator, and the One Laptop Per Child effort from MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte are good examples of specialized products that we'd be developing for those markets.

Read the full interview at Hardware Secrets.