Last Friday AMD said its CTO Phil Hester was resigning to “pursue other opportunities,” claiming it had nothing to do with the 10% reduction in force it intends making to cut costs in the face of its sales shortfall. It also said it won’t replace him.

So observers, not believing that “other opportunities” bit, figured that if AMD isn’t spinning a yarn and trying to save a buck on a mostly decorative post and Hester’s leaving under his own stream then, they speculated, it must have cut Hester’s projects and, since he got to AMD in 2005, he’s been most closely associated with the ATI Fusion and “accelerated computing” ventures of putting CPUs and GPUs together on the same die in different ratios for different purposes.

AMD said the projects continue. (Otherwise the company would be hard pressed to justify the $5.4 billion king’s ransom it spent on ATI.)

And when asked about Hester’s departure Thursday during the company’s quarterly conference call with Wall Street, AMD president Dirk Meyer repeated that Hester’s leaving held no implications for AMD’s roadmap, adding that he was going to hire people with “better talent and better experience.”

So that seems to answer that question.

Hester arrived at AMD after his Newisys Opteron-based server start-up hit the wall and splattered. Before that little adventure he spend 20-odd years at IBM working on things like the RS/6000. He had something of a reputation for being more of a show dog than a working dog.

Executive departures from AMD started last year and have so far included chief sales and marketing officer Henri Richard, director of product marketing for graphics Vijay Sharma and senior VP, worldwide sales Rick Hegberg.