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."

Comments

Re:25 years?

[Ingolfke]

Stint - A length of time spent in a particular way:

Looks like a valid use of the word to me.

Athlon 64 wins performance prize

[Mobile Unit of the G]

It depends on the game, but the Athlon 64 usually beats the Pentium 4.

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050627/athlon_fx 57-06.html#opengl

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

Re:Move over Intel (hopefully)

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

AMD: true dual core -- now.
Intel: piecemeal dual core

AMD: mobile 64-bit cpu
Intel: mobile 32 cpu based on the Pentium iii(and is not planning to go to 64 bit there)

Open your eyes, my friend. AMD is already the next generation.

Need to keep the pressure on

[edxwelch]

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.

Leakage problems with next-gen processes

[Pulzar]

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.