Updated Influential Silicon Valley newspaper the San Jose Mercury News reported over the weekend that AMD's CEO, Jerry Sanders III, is likely to pass day to day operations at the company to Atiq Raza this week. Since the story we posted at 0800:17 this morning, AMD has declined to tell us what is happening, although one insider said: "Haven't you heard about the conference call?" We hadn't and haven't. According to Silicon Valley, Atiq Raza is likely to be appointed as the firm's president and sole chief operating officer by AMD's board of directors during the course of the week. That will give Raza day to day control of the company at one of its most difficult periods in its history. The company is poised to introduce its K7 chip in July and turned in bad financial results recently. Although Sanders, who formerly worked with Andy Grove at Fairchild, will keep his position as chairman, the situation is analagous to Intel's Grove turning over day-to-day running to Craig Barrett. In the last few weeks, AMD and Sanders have received a blizzard of class action suits, as reported here earlier. Raza formerly worked at NexGen, the company AMD acquired in 1995. Technology from NexGen is at the basis of K6-III and K7 technology. Last weekend we reported an AMD engineer as claiming that while the technology of the firm is sound, the same could not be said of its management. (Story: AMD K7-500 beats Pentium III/500). ®