Former AMD Opteron Exec Pat Patla Joins Samsung

As AMD's new CEO Rory Read is bringing in new executive staff that is closely related to Lenovo and IBM, there have been a number of high-profile departures at the company.

We just reported about Godfrey Cheng, who told his Facebook contacts yesterday that he resigned last week and is taking a brief break. We've learned about Pat Patla, former general manager and vice president for AMD's Opteron business, has been hired as a vice president by Samsung.

There have been no details on the departures of Cheng and Patla, other than both left the company voluntarily. Patla's move to Samsung is indicative for Samsung's aspirations to compete with x86 processors on a much broader level, ranging from mobile computing devices to compact notebooks all the way up to low-power servers.

A Bloomberg report states that Samsung has been hiring AMD engineers to design server products for some time now and that companies such as Dell are testing ARM-based server chips. Common sense would suggest that Patla, who has close ties to vendors such as Dell and IBM, is heading up the server division for Samsung.