Advanced Micro Devices announced that senior VP and chief technology officer Phil Hester has resigned. In a brief statement, an AMD spokesperson said that Phil Hester will pursue other opportunities, but nothing was announced about his future plans.

“He’s pursuing other opportunities,” the spokesman said of Hester. “He has not disclosed his future plans‿

In addition, AMD said that the company will not replace Hester and instead his responsibilities will be spread among the others five CTOs of AMD’s business units. Phil Hester, who is 52 years old, has worked 23 years for IBM, before joining AMD in 2005.

Hester’s resignation follows after on Monday AMD said that its sales for the last financial quarter would be $1.5 billion, below $1.6 billion predicted by the analysts. AMD announced it will reduce its workforce by 10%, which means close to 1,600 employees.

However, the company explained that Hester’s resignation isn’t related to the job cuts.  The news comes in a time when AMD is trying to get back on its feet and shake losses that have been plaguing the company in the past period, causing it to lose ground in the face of its fiercest competitor, Intel.

Phil Hester was responsible for the development of a new class of x86 processor that integrates the central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) at the silicon level with a broad set of design initiatives collectively codenamed “Fusion.‿ 

Fusion processors are scheduled to be launched in late 2008/early 2009, and the company expects to use them within all of the company’s priority computing categories, including laptops, desktops, workstations and servers, as well as in consumer electronics and solutions tailored for the unique needs of emerging markets.

Mike Uhler, former CTO of chipmaker MIPS Technologies and VP of accelerated computing at AMD, who joined the company last year, will be responsible for the further development of Fusion. He will report directly to company President Dirk Meyer.

On April 9, AMD announced that its quad-core Opteron processor, better known as “Barcelona,‿ is now widely available, and it has support from several of AMD’s vendor partners.

Although the company announced the new lineup in September, AMD was forced to the push the shipment of its new Opteron processors to the fist quarter of 2008 because of an error that was located on the L3 cache of the chip.

AMD is expected to unveil during this year is first 45-nanometer microprocessors. Its rival, Intel, has been shipping 45-nanometer processors since the fourth quarter of 2007.