AMD announced Thursday it had hired long time networking executive Suresh Gopalakrishnan to be vice president and general manager of AMD’s server business unit, overseeing the company’s Opteron and cloud server efforts.

Dr. Gopalakrishnan comes to AMD from Extreme Networks, where he served as vice president of Engineering. He has previously served in a variety of executive positions at firms such as Sun Microsystems, and HP.

Under Dr. Gopalakrishnan, AMD’s server division will continue to focus its efforts around performance, energy efficiency and cost, says Lisa Su, senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s global business units.

“Today’s data center operators and enterprises need to reduce cost and power consumption while increasing performance, and AMD has been working hard to meet these needs with our AMD Opteron processor family and SeaMicro fabric technology,” Dr. Su said in a prepared statement. “Under Suresh’s leadership, we will accelerate our disruptive server strategy by leveraging our broad IP portfolio to deliver superior products designed to offer the world’s best performance-per-dollar and power efficiency.

AMD has long struggled to regain server market share from Intel; AMD once had the upper hand as it was an innovator in multicore and point-to-point systems until Intel copied and perfected these concepts.

AMD, in turn, pulled off an impressive coup against Intel when it acquired SeaMicro – a company that holds lucrative cloud and microserver IP.