Mumbai: Hector Ruiz has stepped down as chief executive of the embattled chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc, after a 6-year stint, as pressure mounted on the company to get out of a deep financial mess and recover from a product war it lost to Intel.

Dirk Meyer, 46, AMD's current president and chief operating officer, will replace Ruiz as CEO. An engineer and chip designer, Meyer has been helping Ruiz run the company since 2006.

Ruiz, 62, who took over as CEO of Sunnyvale-based  AMD from its founder and longtime chief executive Jerry Sanders, will remain on the board of director as executive chairman.

As executive chairman, Ruiz will help AMD plot a strategy for slashing its manufacturing expenses amidst a fierce battle with Intel.

Meyer had previously led AMD's microprocessor division, the company's primary business unit. He was involved in the design of AMD's Opteron server chip, which marked the company's 2003 foray into a lucrative segment of the server market where Intel had a stranglehold.

While AMD rose itself as a serious challenge in the chip market, it has only a 20 per cent of the global chip market against rival Intel's 80 per cent.

AMD has been down in the past two years,, racking up billions in losses and struggling to regain the competitive edge.

The executive shuffle came as AMD reported a $1.19 billion loss in the second quarter, worse than the $600 million it lost in the same period a year ago. AMD's revenue rose to $1.35 billion from $1.31 billion.

The losses came mostly from AMD's divisions that make chips for cell phones and digital television sets. The businesses were absorbed as part of AMD's 2006 acquisition of graphics chip maker ATI Technologies.

AMD said it plans to sell the businesses and have classified them as discontinued operations in its financial results.