Mark Papermaster

Mark D. Papermaster (born 1961) On January 25, 2019 he was promoted to AMD's Executive Vice President.

Papermaster previously worked at IBM from 1982 to 2008, of the company's silicon engineering development. Papermaster joined AMD on October 24, 2011, assuming oversight for all of AMD's technology teams and the creation of all of AMD's products, Promoted to vice president of IBM's Microprocessor Technology Development unit, Wired reports that “Papermaster was a key player in developing the PowerPC chips used in [early] Macs.”

Papermaster moved from microprocessors to become vice president of the Blade Development Unit in October 2006. arguing that Apple had hired him for his management and engineering abilities, not for insider knowledge of IBM processors. Apple and IBM reached a settlement in January 2009 where "Papermaster could only work for Apple after a six month unpaid vacation."

Papermaster joined Apple on April 24, 2009 as senior vice president of Mobile Devices and Devices Hardware Engineering. Reporting to Steve Jobs, he was given direct oversight of the iPod and iPhone engineering teams, including iPhone hardware development and the June 2010 rollout of the iPhone 4.

CTO and executive VP at AMD (2011–present) On October 19, 2011, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announced that Papermaster had been appointed its senior vice president (SVP) of Technology & Engineering, as well as its chief technology officer (CTO). He was officially appointed to both roles on October 24, 2011. As SVP of the newly formed Technology & Engineering Group under former CEO Rory Read, Papermaster was given oversight for all of AMD's technology teams.

One of his first orders of business was to restructure the CPU design team to build Zen, a new high performance x86 processor core. Under Papermaster, by early 2017 several other new lines of CPUs and graphic processors were under development as well, for example the data center processor EPYC series, which launched in June 2017 with AMD's new Zen (microarchitecture). Ryzen Threadripper high-end desktop processors released in the summer of 2017 also utilized Zen. Also in 2017, Papermaster announced that AMD would continue to develop hardware using both its new Vega graphics architecture and its older Polaris system. At that point he had been heading the company's push into using 7 nm processor nodes, announced as a key component in upcoming Zen and Navi-based processors. immersive technology, He has also written articles for publications such as Dark Reading, ET Tech, Forbes, IEEE Test & Design Magazine, Inc., and Network Computing.

He has also given talks at industry events, for example "How To Build Truly Great Products" at the Design Automation Conference in 2016 and “Evolving Embedded Systems in a Self-Directed World” at Embedded World in 2018. He also spoke at the 2016–2017 Techfest and was a keynote speaker at the Imagination Tech Summit in 2017. In 2017 he spoke at the Strategic Materials Conference, and he also gave a talk on Moore's Law Plus at the IEEE Industry Summit on the Future of Computing in 2017. In April 2018, he spoke at the Congress on the Future of Engineering Software.

Organizations Papermaster is a member of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, the Olin College Presidents Council, and the advisory board at Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas. Also at the University of Texas, he has been on the school's electrical and computer engineering advisory council. He was included on the Forbes Technology Council as a contributor as of June 2016. In August 2017, he was announced as a new member of the advisory board of the CTO Forum.

Awards and honors In 2025, Papermaster was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.