Hector Ruiz, Chairman, President and 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.