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AMD Lures IBM Veteran to Lead Chip Design
Rob writes "Computer Business Review is reporting that Advanced Micro Devices yesterday said it had hired Jeff VerHeul away from IBM to
lead the direction of AMD's future silicon design. VerHeul's most recent post during his
25-year stint at IBM was head of engineering and technology services. Now, he will lead
the development of all future AMD computing products, including silicon roadmap design
across all AMD's engineering sites worldwide."
Who else is waiting for the next slashdot story
"ex-IBM Engineer sued for violating non compete agreement"
this must mean that AMD will switch to PowerPC!!!
Hopefully this will give nex-gen AMD chips a fresh design and hopefully push them to a significant majority over Intel. I've always personally favoured AMD chips, simply because they're damn good value, and efficient.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
Don't be hatin' IBM. They've had some really good ideas/innovations in the past and I figured an IBM team member would end up either at AMD or Google.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I bet AMD will produce the Cell chips.
So isn't this by all signs a step backwards?
This is slightly off topic but I've heard that AMD chips are supposedly better for gaming than their Intel equivalents.
Is this marketing hype? User hype? Any truth or unsubstantiated personal anecdotes to confirm or deny?
Stint - A length of time spent in a particular way:
Looks like a valid use of the word to me.
In other news...
Local Ice Cream Shop Scores Big Hiring Scoop
Rita's Water Ice yesterday announced it had hired Mary Lopez, 15-year old former ice-cream scooper at Little Shop of Ice Cream. Lopez's career at LSIC consisted of serving drinks, hot dogs and various frozen ice cream and custard products. She will now be responsible for Rita's [...]
I'm a big tall mofo.
It depends on the game, but the Athlon 64 usually beats the Pentium 4.
x 57-06.html#opengl
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050627/athlon_f
The Opteron, high-end cousin of the Athlon 64, is a great chip for servers. We have a Sun V40z, and the guys I work with are always amazed at how fast it is, and we've only got single core processors -- with dual cores, it'll smoke just about anything:
http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/v40z/index.jsp
Maybe this IBM veteran is attracted to designing a lead chip, but there will be no market for it in Europe. Chips containing lead will be banned next year due to the RoHS directive...
Let's face it, there hasn't been a major breakthrough in chip design since Lays produced their first prototype of the "crinkle cut".
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Athlon wins the prize for brute CPU power, but the real strength of PowerPC is that IBM can design custom chips based on combining PowerPC cores with additional processing elements. This technology is behind Deep Blue, Blue Gene, the PS3, and the Xbox 360.
This kind of chip is hard to program for, but can deliver unbeatable performance per dollar, square centimeter and watt when software is codesigned with the hardware.
AMD and Intel are going in this direction with dual-core, but IBM is already way ahead. For instance, BlueGene is based on a special chip that has two PowerPC cores with an incoherent cache (tricky to program but cheap and fast) and adds an enhanced vector processing unit. IBM is a leader in higher-end SoC solutions (really, anything that gets power from the wallplug instead of a battery.) Lower-power applications are using MIPS and ARM cores instead...
Good, now AMD can get on that Terminator "Liquid Metal" technology.
Ignore Alien Orders
you're right, it's a perfectly cromulent word.
Yes, but I have heard it more often than not carrying a brief or scant connotation. (Maybe I just hang around the wrong crowd?)
...who goes to work where? Keep luring each other. shaking things up is always good. Especially in these times when I hear that china has a double growth rate than US. There are more things than getting into a bitch-fight all the time.Eventually all those cheap chips will be sold on the chinese flea market. So keep fightin'...
Java Oracle Linux Enthusiast
stop trying to embiggen your karma!
One thing that has been interesting me lately, after reading a series of Anadtech articles on current and near-future processor tech is the possible inclusion of SMT (oft marketed as Hyperthreading by Intel) on AMD cores.
The article mentions the POWER5 chip and it's implementation of SMT and how it behaves with multi-core chips (i.e. how it can devote all threads on one core to a single task, with the other core(s) sharing the workload via SMT) and how it's rather more impressive that the HyperThreading[TM] on Intel P4's, although I'm not a microprocesor guru.
Whilst I can understand AMD's decision not to put SMT in their current processors, with the recent focus on multi-core and multi-threading I think they'd be foolish not to think about it soon, and (as someone not very up on non-x86 chips) it seems IBM's POWER5 is a good base to emulate. Does anyone have any information on SMT implementations in POWER other chips like Sparc and Itanium?
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
first laugh of the morning.. gotta love it
you got my number!
while we are on the subject, I found out wikipedia has a nice page about all these made-up words:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromulent
They'll need all the help they can to keep the lead on Intel.
Intel's 90nm process was a disaster, due to leakage problems.
According to here http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=25512 Intels 65nm process solves some of the leakage problems and is due to be released very soon.
I get the impression that this will make it on par with AMD's current 90nm process as regards power consumption.
When the 45nm process comes out the leakage problem will be completly fixed completely.
Hopefully this will give nex-gen AMD chips a fresh design and hopefully push them to a significant majority over Intel.
This will not happen. Intel's marketing prowess is much better than its competition. What would scare Intel (and the others) is a revolutionary new chip that solves a major problem in the industry. Consider that all processor architectures are based on and optimized for the algorithm, a custom started by a guy named Babbage more than 150 years ago. Progress has only been incremental since.
A really new architecture should abandon the algorithmic model and adopt a non-algorithmic, signal-based synchronous software model. It would revolutionize computing and solve the nastiest problem in the computer industry: software unreliability.
But we cannot expect big companies like Intel, AMD and IBM to be truly innovative. Their approach is evolutionary, not revolutionary. Hopefully a bright upstart will get the message and make a killing while the behemoths are busy fighting each other for market share. They won't know what hit them until it is too late.
The message is that there is a solution to the software reliability crisis. The disadvantage is that it will require a radical change in both processor architecture and software construction methodology. But the advantage is too good to ignore: 100% software reliability! Guaranteed!
I usually hear stint used as, "a short stint". Perhaps that is where you get the feeling that it refers to a short period of time.
VerHeul's most recent post during his 25-year stint at IBM was head of engineering and technology services.
I read the first half of this and thought, "wow, this guy has had a weblog for 25 years!"
The headline I've been waiting for is "IBM to buy AMD". Then AMD wouldn't have to worry about joint development deals any more, and IBM would suddenly have a world class x86 chip to sell - and their size, reputation, and chip capacity would probably get the AMD64 some serious market share. Now IBM has someone they trust over at AMD who has the background to evaluate the sensibility of such a deal. All they'd need to do is have lunch six months down the road, and ask the magic question - a simple yes or no could decide it.
This was likely done with IBM's approval. AMD and IBM recently extended their chip development cooperation agreement. I'd sooner expect IBM to buy AMD than sue them but even that's not all that likely.
As bad as that is for IBM, it's great to see AMD taking some strides.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
Opteron and MCA, together at last! What more could anybody want?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
... IBM helped AMD out to design the Athlon. At least this is what i read when it came out. The autor also said that at this time AMD were barely able to compete with intel, and maybe IBM did not want intel to become the only player in the consumer processor market. I don't remember everythign but i know ibm gave amd some important technologies to keep up with intel. So they must be in good contact and maybe Jeff VerHeul (is this really the correct notation?) worked with amd for years now and just decided to make it official...
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Sun's Niagara "combines chip multiprocessing (CMP) and SMT to do Chip Multithreading.
... they have the new 64-bit Sempron budget processor.
I'd rather have both Intel and AMD going at it, instead of either one alone. Monopolies are not kind.
That crack rock's gone to your head.
"... signal-based synchronous software model. It would revolutionize computing and solve the nastiest problem in the computer industry: software unreliability."
Software would be reliable if we could produce 100% algorithms which are free from unconsidered and unhandled cases. It has nothing to do with the medium of execution, and everything to do with the design. This is why computer engineering needs to be a more popular topic.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Change the letters on the sign and put on your ties. Hurry.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
His new office is a conference room I used to use at AMD's Austin South site. :(
It has no windows
Does this mean a mix between AMD64 and PPC?
Predicted when IBM hyped the cell processor a few months ago that you'd to better with an AMD cell processor once AMD hired IBM's managers. Sure enough, you'll do better with an AMD cell processor.
When the 45nm process comes out the leakage problem will be completly fixed completely.
Yeah, and they'll get the Nobel Prize for that, since the power consumption due to leakage increases with the descrease in process size. In fact, it's getting so high in chips being currently designed that the static power consumption is becoming higher than the dynamic power consumption due to the signal switching.
But, Intel will fix it completely with their next process. It'll be easy.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
Pringles, little perfect rhomboid forms composed of industrially processed potato flakes. There is no more perfect snack food. Plus you can use the can for a nice directional 802.11b antenna. How can you post on Slashdot and not know of this? Time to take back your nerd license.
It is not difficult to hire whomever you want away from IBM now. The environment at IBM has been deteriorating for a couple of years now. I don't know anyone within global services who wouldn't jump at the chance to work for another company. Recently, they have been conducting employee satisfaction surveys in an attempt to figure out why everyone is so unhappy.
Sam Palmisano doesn't make any sense whatsoever. He is not sure what kind of company he wants to be CEO of. In a recent employee broadcast he was asked, "if IBM is doing so well, why is our stock price so low?". He answered, "our stock price is low because IBM is perceived as a technology company... we need to find a way to not be perceived as a technology company". Guess what, everyone I know at IBM wants to work for a technology company.
"On Demand" makes no sense whatsoever. Employees at IBM can't figure out what the hell Sam is talking about when he uses the words "on demand". Just when we think we understand, he switches the definition. They recently sent a team of presenters to try and explain what "on demand" meant... everyone walked out more confused than when they went in.
Their strategy is simple: Hire the best they can find.
Hey now, I understand I didn't say much about my reasons for believing AMD has been out-innovating IBM, but no reason to put little men made of straw in my mouth (and then bash them to their component molecules). As the article states, this guy is responsible for overall direction, and I was assuming that was the topic--my comment was directed towards that.
In my layman's, PC tech hobbyist mind, the design efficacy hierarchy (at least for the current generation) from best to worst is something like: AMD, IBM, Intel. I recognize this guy is a big name and stuff, but surely AMD doesn't need to mess with their overall design strategy if it is indeed already the most effective one.
Can someone tell me where I might find silicon roadmaps? My roadmaps are all made of paper, and get ruined when I spill coffee on them. Silicon roadmaps would surely solve this problem...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant