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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!!!
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...
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.