Advanced Micro Devices on Friday announced that chief technology officer at the company will resign and will not be replaced. The company indicated that at the moment the company has five chief technology officers at different business divisions and there is no need for a chief technology officer at AMD.

As chief technology officer Phil Hester was responsible for setting the architectural and product strategies and plans for AMD’s microprocessor business. Mr. Hester was the head of the AMD technology council, ensuring that product development, integration, and process organizations align technology capabilities with product direction. Mr. Hester joined AMD in 2005, when the company was solely a maker of central processing units, whereas after the acquisition of ATI Technologies in late 2006 the world’s second largest maker of x86 chips became a provider of graphics processing units, multimedia chips for consumer electronics as well as core-logic chipsets.

Before joining AMD, Hester was co-founder and chief executive officer at Newisys, a Sanmina-SCI company, and spent 23 years at IBM serving in a variety of key leadership and executive technical roles. While at IBM, Hester led a number of system technology development efforts, including the RS/6000, and served as one of 15 members of the IBM corporate technology council.

It is unclear which projects at AMD were coordinated by Phil Hester, though, it is widely believed that he was involved into the creation of AMD’s processors with built-in graphics cores, code-named Fusion and Swift.

Currently AMD has five chief technology officers at five product divisions:

• Raja Koduri – Graphics chief technology officer
• Mark Bapst – Handheld chief technology officer
• Samir Hulyalkar – Digital TV chief technology officer
• Mike Goddard – Client chief technology officer
• Rich Oehler – Server chief technology officer