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It's one thing if a long time employee leaves your ranks with good will, wishing you the best for the future, but it's another thing entirely if he goes over to the other side. That's what seems to have happened in the case of Phil Rogers, who after working for AMD for over two decades has now taken up a position at the company's main graphics rival, Nvidia. He hasn't taken on a small or advisory role either. Rogers is now the new chief software architect at the green firm.
Rogers was originally part of ATI, working there for many years before being folded into AMD after it purchased the long-time GPU maker. He was eventually made a Corporate Fellow in 2007, making him one of the highest ranking members of its technical team. He has been very active in the past few years helping develop the software behind AMD's hardware, as well as making announcements and presenting technology to peers, journalists and the public alike.
Source: HSA Foundation
He is also considered one of the more important people behind the development of the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) joint development project, which seeks to make CPUs and GPUs operate on the same bus with shared memory. It has the potential to ‘unlock' a lot of performance in already existing hardware, eliminating bottlenecks in the system. While still in its early days, as Anandtech points out, it may be that Rogers considers his work there done.
If true, it puts Rogers in a similar category to Jim Keller, another AMD employee and a CPU architect in his own right, who left AMD after completing his work on the next-generation Zen processors earlier this year.
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KitGuru Says: This is not a great time for AMD. Fans will be hoping next year's new CPU line really makes an impact, as the last thing we need is a one horse race in the CPU and GPU markets.
AMD made a terrible mistake when buying ATI. Then made that crap APU (crAPU) and went to sleep …. bad moves AMD. Now…. who is going to save us from Intel and Nvidia?
The ATI acquisition had nothing to do with the technical design of Phenom, Bulldozer and all successful refreshers of Bulldozer. Also, since AMD sold its fabs as no one but the wealthiest firms can afford to maintain them, it was also just a matter of time before Intel steam rolled any AMD CPU due to Intel’s manufacturing node advantage alone. Considering how many more engineers Intel has always had, it was a miracle AMD even got so close with Athlon XP+ and won with A64/X2/Opterons of that era. The ATI acquisition did not influence the horribly slow IPC designs of their CPUs. That was all on AMD’s CPU management/engineering division.
The money they put to buy ATI should have been an investment in better CPU technology research.. engineers aren’t cheap!… how that is not related???
The Athlon XP+ was designed in 1999 and beat out the Pentium 3 and still competed with the Pentium 4. An AMD Athlon XP+2800 @ 2.08 or 2.1 Ghz was equivalent to a Pentium 4 @ 2.8 Ghz, which was released in 2000 and in 2003 AMD released the Athlon 64 which was twice as fast as the previous Athlon XP+. So AMD had a huge performance gain over Intel but it was AMD that destroyed their company and no one else.
I wonder if this means Nvidia may be getting into the X86 CPU market?
No. Intel for CPU, and NVidia for GPU. That’s what he means if AMD can’t compete with a CPU or GPU.