Hector Ruiz, Chairman, President & CEO / Advanced Micro Devices

Unlike his former boss, AMD founder Jerry Sanders, the understated Ruiz, who turns 60 next month, tends to avoid boasting and antagonizing competitors. Ruiz’s leadership style is to focus more on operational efficiency and measured expansion.

That approach may be paying off. After beating Intel to market with a 64-bit x86 processor, AMD jumped ahead again with the first dual-core processor for servers. Though Intel finally shipped its own dual-core Xeon chip, AMD’s success in the server market has been undeniable.

The company’s processors, with their integrated memory core, have been particularly attractive in the high-performance computing arena, and its share of the server market grew to 8 percent in the second quarter, up from 4.8 percent a year earlier.

AMD also has made inroads in retail desktops, where research firm Current Analysis put its share at 52 percent in September. No wonder third-quarter earnings jumped 73 percent to $76 million while sales grew 23 percent to $1.52 billion.

AMD, though, has had a rocky financial history. The company opened a new fab last month that should help alleviate the product delays and supply problems that have plagued AMD in the past, but Ruiz is going to have to stay on a steady course.

As a teenager, he walked across the border from Mexico every day to attend a high school in Eagle Pass, Texas, and ultimately graduated valedictorian. Now it looks like Ruiz is taking AMD on a similar path to success.