Last year AMD was hemorrhaging talent. While we don't have a good indication of the extent of the talent exodus, Qualcomm seemed to benefit quite a bit from the tough times that had fallen on AMD. AMD PR mounted the beginnings of a turnaround with the announcement that Jim Keller, former K8 architect and chip-head at Apple had rejoined the company. Then came John Gustafson and last month, we got word that Raja Koduri rejoined as well - also after a multi-year stint at Apple.
Today I just got word from a couple of very accurate and trusted sources that my old friend Sean Pelletier will be joining AMD as well. Sean will abandon his role as Senior Technical Marketing Manager at NVIDIA to assume a similar role at AMD, initially focusing on GPUs. Reporting on individual hires doesn't actually tell you a lot about talent within a company, but it can give insight into whether or not a company is viable. Not too long ago, leaving Apple, NVIDIA or pretty much any other tech company to join AMD sounded like a career death sentence. The fact that smart folks from all paths are considering AMD as an option for long term employment tells us a lot about how things have changed.
Update: I just got word that Sean ended up back at NVIDIA. He sent me a message after making the decision saying that there wasn't anything wrong with AMD, but that the fit simply didn't feel right.
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Hector2 - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - link
It's always good to have a dreamtviceman - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link
Nvidia and AMD have swapped a few employees in the past year or so. Kinda strange if you ask me.Tuvok86 - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link
Is he the guy who invented graphs that don't start at zero? : Dhfm - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link
Hahah.. I love those graphs!nVIdia ********************
AMD ******************
0 10
nVidia ********************
AMD **********
8 10
As an fanboy/gullible consumer which graph suits you best? :)
hfm - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link
Ouch.. formatting fail.. owell. :)speculatrix - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link
I'd consider buying an AMD GPU card if I knew they were serious about supporting linux, which is what I run on my laptop and desktop computers 97% of the time they are powered on*. No amount of slick marketing is going to persuade me to buy AMD/ATI over NVidia or Intel, because no matter how good the benchmarks might look, a card that turns into a brick after upgrading my OS and the drivers failing and there being no updates, is a waste of money.* windows is booted very rarely, for special utilities that aren't on linux. last time was yesterday for ODIN to reflash a Samsung phone.
hfm - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link
What apps are you using in Linux that utilize GPU? Not asking to be sarcastic I'm truly interested.mrtg - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link
cgminer -- churning away rock solid for months!JarredWalton - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 - link
HD 7970M is about 300MHash/s so I wouldn't really think that's a viable way to go, except to supplement hashing power. You're far better off just buying inexpensive desktop GPUs, or FPGAs (or if you can find one for sale, ASICs).Stuka87 - Monday, May 20, 2013 - link
AMD's drivers are actually Open Source, nVidia's are not. In my experience AMD's drivers for linux have worked better than nVidia's over the last year or so.