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

Next slashdot story...

[Saven Marek]

Who else is waiting for the next slashdot story

"ex-IBM Engineer sued for violating non compete agreement"

Re:Next slashdot story...

[ThePepe]

I havent actually checked to see which specific site Verheul was previously employed but given that both Intel's and AMD's headquarters are located in California he probably doesnt have anything to worry about.

My questions is how long are the rest of us going to have to wait before a ban on non-compete clauses filters out to the other 49 states?

Re:Next slashdot story...

[swillden]

"ex-IBM Engineer sued for violating non compete agreement"

Very unlikely, IMHO. I've worked for IBM for the last 10 years, and I've seen firsthand how IBM handles these sorts of situations -- with kid gloves. Although IBM employees sign an employment contract that includes a non-compete clause, IBM almost never tries to enforce it. For example, I know a former IBM executive who violated his IBM non-compete agreement by going to work for a client, as CEO. That's not at all unusual, of course, though it is very bad form. What makes this situation unique is that this guy didn't bother to notify IBM of the fact that he'd taken another job, and simply drew both salaries for several months until he was caught.

IBM did nothing other than record the incident in his record and mark him as a person never to be hired by IBM again in any capacity. However, even that is less severe than it sounds... I know another guy who was fired and marked unhirable, and he's working for IBM right now.

I'll be *very* surprised if IBM does anything. IBM is very afraid of looking like a big bad company who picks on defenseless individuals and smaller companies (and how many companies *aren't* smaller?). In most cases IBM would rather eat a loss than sue and take a PR hit. Depending on the size of the loss, of course.

Re:Next slashdot story...

[ms1234]

For some reason I've read the headline as "AMD lubes ...". Must get eyes checked.

OMG, thist must mean...

[DohnJoe]

this must mean that AMD will switch to PowerPC!!!

Move over Intel (hopefully)

[Kawahee]

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.

Re:Move over Intel (hopefully)

[gregorio]

I've always personally favoured AMD chips, simply because they're damn good value, and efficient.

Or maybe because you're the typical geek who hates everything that's big and dominant. Geeks need to love "different" things, made for "special" people or not. Geeks need iPods and Unix computers, because other players and Windows computers are not for special people like you guys.

If someday AMD beats the crap out of Intel and start to be the big guy, you might as well start talking about the superiority of Intel products and how it is so unfair that AMD dominates the market. =]

And my point is...? Well, it's not really smart to be such a big fan of a company/group/etc. I think that we should give our respect to good products, actions and attitudes. Cheerleading for a commercial entity is just pure nonsense. I'm a consumer, I want good products, good actions and good attitudes. The world is about results. It's naive to expect that just because you "like" a group all of their actions are going to fit your views and needs. It's up to their shareholders if AMD is going to succeed in the long term, have giant profits or giant marketshare.

I'm giving my soul to good results, not for companies, groups or whatever. That's why my current PC holds an AMD processor. Next time I'm buying a computer, I'll just buy whatever is best for me, AMD or not. I'm not "hoping" AMD wins, I'm just hoping the market is filled with good products and plenty of choice.

Re:Move over Intel (hopefully)

[utopianfiat]

Score 3 insightful? gregorio just went off on a rant that was totally unrelated to the original post:

>> I've always personally favoured AMD chips, simply because they're damn good value, and efficient.
> I think that we should give our respect to good products, actions and attitudes.

Parent never said he was a *fan* of AMD, just that he liked AMD's products. Your entire post, albeit interesting, is moot point. Which I guess is alright, (+4 interesting, -1 moot)
I think calling people on fanatical cheerleading of companies that clearly don't deserve it (see: Apple, Microshaft) is probably something we need to call them on, but I don't see a problem with cheerleading a company that produces good products, tends to be the "good guy" in relation to their major competitor (see: Intel v. AMD for list of anti-competitve abuses, try groklaw, I'm lazy), and generally has more advanced processors.
Also, it's not that it's "unfair" that Intel dominates the market, it's that they dominate it unfairly. If you read the literature behind the Intel v. AMD case, you'll see how Intel basically has a testicle-grip over a lot of the market using scare tactics and deep pockets to keep AMD off the shelves.
Personally, I'm *hoping* AMD wins, because right now AMD, I think, is the best option for myself and my systems, not to mention I'd like to reward competition and innovation.

Re:Move over Intel (hopefully)

[4of12]

I think that we should give our respect to good products, actions and attitudes.

Excellent. Everyone agrees on this one.

Now consider that when the number of competitors in a marketplace decreases, that the remaining businesses don't need to provide as much quality for the price. Ultimately, with a single large dominant player in the marketplace, be it chips, OS, routers, petrol, telephone service or whatever, you end up paying a lot of money for little quality.

And there are multiple barriers to entry in any of these markets.

So the customer gets shafted.

How can the marketplace dynamics change for the better?

1. Government regulation. [Which is imperfect, given that legislation is crafted in a marketplace, too.]
2. Increase the number of sellers [eg, China, India.]
3. Lower the barriers to entry, say through technological means.
4. Artificially encourage small competitors by creating a culture of irrational fanboys buying Product B because it's rare and gives them 733t status. They don't mind the technical hurdles and actually relish overcoming them.

Cheerleading for a commercial entity is just pure nonsense.

Cheerleading may be irrational, but it remains one of the ways to change the marketplace dynamics.

If irrational fans support niche players like AMD, Apple, Linux, non-Cisco routers and biodiesel fuels, then I know I'll benefit. So I don't complain.

IBM

[Renraku]

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.

Re:IBM

[rholliday]

Exactly. As I understand it, IBM developed and owns the 64-bit board architecture. Just a small thing.

But...why?

[MunchMunch]

I'm certainly not an expert, as I'm sure many replies will point out, but I thought AMD has been out-innovating IBM's PowerPC line for quite some time.

So isn't this by all signs a step backwards?

Re:But...why?

[ucahg]

Do you think AMD has been out-innovating IBM because all of IBM's engineers are stupid? Do you think its the fault of this one man?

Their strategy is simple: Hire the best they can find.

Re:But...why?

[ZenShadow]

PowerPC isn't IBM's only line. How about Cell? If the rumors about Intel's "new direction" prove out, having someone who developed something like the Cell in house could prove to be very fortuitous.

-S

Re:But...why?

[kalidasa]

The Cell's core CPU is a PowerPC processor. And the PPC is a very good chip - the problem is that IBM decided that it should focus on Power5 and Cell, and neglected the G5 (and had some scaling issue, IIRC). The G5 wouldn't sell nearly as many units as Cell does, and the Power5 probably has a high margin (and is for their own server products). Again, IIRC, IBM tried to sell Apple on the Cell (so they could continue to fulfill their obligations to Apple without keeping up the G5), but Apple felt that the Cell wasn't really a good choice for general-purpose computing.

Re:25 years?

[Ingolfke]

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

Looks like a valid use of the word to me.

In other news...

[bigtallmofo]

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 [...]

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

Lead chip design?

[Serious Simon]

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...

Pah...

[gowen]

Let's face it, there hasn't been a major breakthrough in chip design since Lays produced their first prototype of the "crinkle cut".

Re:Pah...

[gowen]

The defence rests, yr honour.

Power PC's strength is system-on-chip

[Mobile Unit of the G]

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...

SMT

[MrNemesis]

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?

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.

We Need a Revolution in Chip Design

[MOBE2001]

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!

Re:We Need a Revolution in Chip Design

[youknowmewell]

And if you call now you will also receive an Omniscient Hard Disk Drive Solution(R) from Infinium Labs(TM) which will hold 5 PB of data for eternity absolutely free! This OHDDS can withstand obuse from nuclear attacks, millions of computer viruses and worms, hellfire and brimstone, submersion in server administrator urine, and even volcanic eruptions! Order Now!

Re:We Need a Revolution in Chip Design

[drew]

Your silver bullet is no real solution. You would still be dealing with algorithms, you are just pushing them somewhere else and calling them by a different name. The signal based synchronous software model would not (in and of itself) make any improvents to the relibility of software. You state in your paper that hardware flaws are physicial flaws rather than design flaws, which is completely untrue. The hardware world has seen more than it's fair share of design flaws as well. The reason is that QA for hardware is typically much higher than it is for software for three reasons:

1) hardware typically is designed to have longer life cycles than most software. Many chip producers are still actively manufacturing and selling five year old designs, while (for example) Microsoft has not only stopped selling windows 2000, they've also stopped actively supporting it.

2) hardware is difficult to patch after it has been deployed, so they can't just ship a product and then release patches when they find bugs after the fact.

3) hardware is usually much easier to test than software because it is much simpler (in that it is usually designed to perform a much smaller number of tasks in a narrower range of conditions), and a finite series of tests can be designed that achieve full or nearly full coverage.

the real problem with software instability is twofold.
1) marketing pressures in the software industry are such that software tends to be released without bing properly tested, released with known bugs, and more emphasis is put on getting things quickly rather than getting things done well.
2) unlike in other industries, consumers have come to expect that it is normal for software to be buggy or to have numerous patches released after the product. they would never accept this in consumer electronics, cars, public transportation, home appliances, or anything else that they purchase, but somehow this is normal for computer software, so they shrug and go on with their lives.

number 2 is the primary cause, because if it wasn't for number 2, number 1 wouldn't happen. the companies that rush products out the door that are buggy and incomplete would go out of business as people refused to buy their products or returned them en masse for being faulty. (which is another problem with the software industry- people can't return software that doesn't meet expectations like they can in any other sector)

which, by the way, is what happens to just about any non-software company when they release products with the same level of quality control as most software companies.

Cool!

[sharkey]

Opteron and MCA, together at last! What more could anybody want?

Re:Wrong headline

[Knetzar]

Why would IBM want x86? They no longer make PCs and they want to be able to get both Intel and AMD processors for their non-power based servers.

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.

Re:His office has no windows

[JamesTRexx]

I can't wait until our office has no Windows. :-P