AMD Taps Nvidia Veteran As Global Channel Chief

Taylor was named corporate vice president and head of AMD's global channel sales, a position that had been vacant for nearly two years. Taylor will be reporting to Chief Sales Officer John Byrne, who previously held the position of global channel chief until early 2011 and was promoted last summer as head of AMD's sales operations.

"Roy is well known in the IT industry for his energy, his ability to identify new opportunities and his focus on delivering results," Byrne said in a press statement. "I am extremely excited to have him join our team to take our channel business to the next level. Roy's enthusiasm and passion for technology evangelization will help strengthen our channel business as we bring new low-power APUs and discrete GPUs to market in 2013 that provide outstanding value, unmatched graphics capabilities and immersive user experiences."

[Related: AMD Taps New Chief Financial Officer ]

Byrne and Taylor go back a number of years to the days when they worked together at Blue Micro Electronics in the early-to-mid 1990s, selling IBM processors in the U.K. Taylor joined AMD rival Nvidia in 2000 as vice president of the chip maker's EMEA region, and he was also Nvidia's first European employee.

Over the next decade, Taylor served a number of roles at Nvidia, including vice president of GPU sales and vice president of telco relations. Most recently, Taylor spent a brief stint as chief sales officer at Rightware, a Finland-based software start-up that specializes in 3-D interfaces.

Taylor is known as an avid PC gamer and tech enthusiast with a deep background in microprocessors and graphics. He'll be charged with helping jump-start AMD's channel effort, which has waned in recent years even as the beleaguered has launched its new Fusion accelerated processing unit (APU) technology.

The addition of Taylor is a positive sign for AMD, which has lost a number of executives in recent years like former CFO Thomas Seifert, who resigned in September, and Bob Feldstein, who left his post as corporate vice president of business development for Nvidia in July.

PUBLISHED JAN. 11, 2013