You can see my long-awaited story on the county's new and improved sewer plant in tomorrow's paper. Although James DiPasquale, executive director of the sewer plant says the plant needs to expand regardless of whether or not AMD comes to town, I thought this story in Friday's New York Times (and forwarded to me by read Kyle York), might be interested to anyone following AMD's supposedly-imminent arrival.

On that note, I think a wager is in order: which will come first? A new police department here in Saratoga Springs, or AMD's gigantic microchip fabrication facility?

AMD's Chief Technology Officer Resigns

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) -- Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s top technology executive is stepping down as the world's No. 2 microprocessor maker tries to recover from a sales slump triggered by prolonged product delays and tougher competition.

The Sunnyvale-based company said Friday that Chief Technology Officer Phil Hester's resignation is not connected to AMD's financial woes or its recently announced 10 percent reduction of its global work force.

Hester joined the company in 2005 after working for more than two decades at IBM Corp. and was responsible for crafting AMD's technological roadmap over the past three years.

Spokesman Rob Keosheyan declined to give further details about Hester's departure, except to say the position won't be filled because each of AMD's key business units now has its own chief technology officer -- a structure Hester helped establish.

Hester's exit comes as AMD battles to reverse steep losses and fend off a resurgent Intel Corp., AMD's much-larger rival which lost substantial market share to AMD a couple years ago as customers demanded more energy-efficient chips, but has since regained its competitive footing.

AMD continues to be hurt by Intel's new product lineup, technical glitches that have delayed its own products, and heavy costs related to its $5.6 billion acquisition of graphics chip maker ATI Technologies.

AMD's stock has reflected investors' souring sentiment, falling from over $40 in 2006 to around $6 today. AMD shares fell 26 cents, or 4.2 percent, to $6.01 Friday, a down day for many technology stocks.

One of AMD's biggest problems over the past year has been getting its new Opteron server chip -- a key to its financial recovery -- into the hands of customers.

The company's first Opteron chip in 2003 gave AMD an entrance into the lucrative server market and helped AMD steal customers from Intel.

Technical glitches in the latest generation of the chips, however, delayed their full rollout by about 8 months after their official September launch. The new Opteron chips only became widely available this week, when AMD announced that Hewlett-Packard Co. had started shipping machines with the chips inside them.

Keosheyan said Hester's office did not oversee product development -- which is the responsibility of the individual business units, which report to the CEO through different executives -- so he was not responsible for the Opteron delays.

Hester was instrumental in developing AMD's strategy around so-called ''accelerated computing,'' or teaming the microprocessor, or brain of personal computers and servers, with specialized processors to boost performance for certain tasks. Keosheyan said that initiative will continue.

AMD lost more than $3 billion in 2007 on $6 billion in sales, and warned earlier this week that first-quarter sales were lower than expected across all business lines. AMD also announced that it planned to cut 10 percent of its global work force, or about 1,600 workers out of 16,800 worldwide, in a major restructuring that's expected to be completed by September.

Intel, meanwhile, has fared better, in part because its larger size has allowed it to better absorb deep price cuts and it has made the quicker transition to a manufacturing process that lowers the cost of making each chip.

Last year the company earned almost $7 billion on more than $38 billion in sales, as it completed a major restructuring of its own triggered by the intensifying competition with AMD. Intel cut about 10,500 jobs, or 10 percent of its work force, in a move to save about $3 billion a year.