Patrick Moorhead, AMD’s corporate VP for strategy and an AMD Corporate Fellow, is leaving the company, and according to people familiar with his plans, will be launching a consumer-focused technology analyst and consulting firm around the time of the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January.

Moorhead is the last remaining VP been hired by AMD’s legendary founder and former CEO, Jerry Sanders. Over 11 years at AMD he led the company’s marketing efforts around its Athlon PC and Opteron server chips that led to a bit of a renaissance at AMD from about 2005 to 2007, when the chips won a lot of business away from Intel and thus gave the bigger company a major migraine headache.

To place Moorhead (pictured from his Twitter feed) appropriately in AMD’s history, it was during these years that AMD put into products a concept called x86-64, which essentially extended the x86 instruction set — the underlying code that chips from Intel and AMD share — into what was then the bright new world of 64-bit computing, thus paving the way for machines that could contain more than two four gigabytes of memory and could handle more complex computing tasks.

AMD first put forth its approach at a chip industry event in 1999 — one that I happened to cover for a now-defunct outlet called Electronic News — at a time when Intel was championing a different approach to 64-bit computing by starting from scratch with an entirely new design. Its technology was called EPIC, for “explicitly parallel instruction set computing.” The product that eventually resulted was the exotic Itanium chip, which is today the subject of a legal dispute between software giant Oracle and Hewlett-Packard, which is for all intents and purposes the only company selling hardware that runs on Itanium.

AMD ultimately won that argument and Intel embraced its own implementation of AMD’s x86-64, now common in their mainstream desktop, notebook and server chips, but only after giving Intel and its investors fits over lost market share during 2005 and 2006.

Moorhead joined AMD in 2000 from Compaq and had also worked at the not entirely forgotten search engine outfit AltaVista, which had been launched at Digital Equipment Company, then acquired by Compaq, and is now part of Yahoo.

In more recent years he had been known primarily for being an outspoken advocate for the opportunities in mobile computing. One suspects he’ll have more to say on that topic in the coming months.

The first computer ever to pass the petaflop milestone, Roadrunner is more than twice as fast as the top-ranked computer in the previous Top500 ranking. It’s also one of the most energy efficient systems on the Top500. But you wouldn’t know from looking at it. It’s housed in the Los Alamos National Laboratory and will be used principally for nuclear weapons simulations.

How did the Iranian computing center get its hands on 216 Opterons when the chips are embargoed from export to Iran? Well, it didn’t get them from AMD. “AMD fully complies with all United States export control laws, and all authorized distributors of AMD products have contractually committed to AMD that they will do the same with respect to their sales and shipments of AMD products,” the company said in a hastily released statement. “Any shipment of AMD products to Iran by any authorized distributor of AMD would be a breach of the specific provisions of their contracts with AMD.”

So, again, how did 216 Opterons find their way into Iran? Via the United Arab Emirates, perhaps? AMD did, after all, receive $622 million in funding from Mubadala Development Co., the investment arm of the Abu Dhabi government.

The new server chip, which puts four processors on a single silicon die, is the first of its kind and AMD’s shot at regaining some of the market its lost to a resurgent Intel. The company’s market share was about 25% in the middle of 2006. By mid-2007, it had slipped to close to 13%. “There is nothing that we would have been more excited about than getting it out earlier,” AMD CEO Hector Ruiz told eWeek. “But you know we are not making excuses. This is a damn difficult thing to do, as I’m sure you can imagine. …This is 600 million transistors on a chip, four cores, complex technology and tremendous architectural features. It was, frankly, a little tougher challenge than we had anticipated and it frustrated the hell out of us because we wanted to get it out there earlier.”

Of course you did. The Quad-Core AMD Opteron arrives at market nearly a year after Intel began shipping quad-core processors of its own and follows a string of consecutive quarterly losses. The stakes here have been high for quite a while. But is the quad-core Opteron the winning hand for which AMD hopes? Perhaps. Perhaps not. “Barcelona is not the sweeping challenge to Intel they wanted to make,” analyst Rob Enderle told the Austin American Statesman. “This keeps them in the game and competing. But it’s not a leadership position.”

Certainly, Intel doesn’t think so. This morning the company announced that it now expects third quarter revenue to be between $9.4 billion and $9.8 billion, improving on its previous guidance of $9 billion to $9.6 billion.