Richard Huddy rejoins AMD as Gaming Scientist

There are two ways to look at people who have worked for every major company in a given industry. You can take the view that they have never really settled or you can value the additional experience they have gained by seeing how all the main players operate. News in to KitGuru is that Richard Huddy, Godfather of DirectX, has returned to AMD. 

Going back one or two generations, working for one company for most of your life was considered the norm.

When you check the sports pages for F1 drivers or international footballers, hardly a day goes buy without someone speculating about a move from one team to another.

While Huddy started life by coming up with the idea of DirectX with a couple of very smart dudes called Doug and Servan at Rendermorphics (subsequently bought by Microsoft), he then spent the best part of the next 20 years with the biggest hardware vendors.

Initially, he was at nVidia, then ATi – which became AMD – and latterly with Intel.

Our guess is that while Intel puts the CPU at the heart of everything and then rolls in some new additions to graphics every couple of years, a true graphics whiz would feel that the GPU should be closer to the centre and that the pace of change should be much quicker.

As we said back in 2011, Huddy's decision to join Intel was a bit of a surprise, because everyone thought he would be back at AMD after a short hiatus. There's no doubt that Intel is in a much stronger position, graphically, than it was 3 years ago, so maybe some Huddy magic rubbed off.

Given his exclusive interview with KitGuru last year about ‘moving beyond DirectX', we reckon that AMD's Mantle initiative would have been a major factor.

Whatever his reason for parting with Intel, Huddy has now officially joined the office of the CTO at AMD and will be working with his old sparing partner Raja Koduri to help shape tomorrow's graphics world.

Lastly, the influence of AMD CSO John Byrne might have been brought to bear, given how strongly he believes that Mantle is part of AMD's leadership in the field of graphics, as he discussed with us last month.

KitGuru says: While Richard says open standards, the move by Microsoft to acknowledge the power of Mantle by stepping up with DirectX 12 is likely to have been a significant factor in Richard's final decision. It's nice to be wanted.

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