NVIDIA's CUDA and PhysX VP Hired by AMD

When two companies are locked in rivalry, they always seek to outdo their opponent through an optimum and ingenious use of whatever resources they have on hand. On certain rare occasions, however, more unusual developments take place, such as special deals that make certain applications run better on the solutions developed by one or the other. Even more unusual situations may arise, though, and one of AMD's most recent announcements is sheer proof of this.

What occurred can be seen as a genuine case of shifting allegiances for pure business reasons. In short, a certain figurehead from one of NVIDIA's divisions has been hired by AMD to oversee the Fusion Experience Program. The one to make the switch from the former to the latter is Manju Hegde.

Manju Hegde was a co-founder of Ageia Technologies, the company behind the PhysX technology eventually acquired by the Santa Clara-based GPU maker. After that, he was NVIDIA's CUDA technical Marketing Vice president. From now on, he will report to Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager at AMD Products Group. What Hedge will be tasked with doing will be finding solutions and applications that will truly benefit from the AMD Fusion accelerated processing units, the first of which (Llano) will make its debut in 2011, as part of the Sabine notebook platform.

“We are thrilled to be able to attract an experienced industry leader like Manju Hegde to the AMD team, a sign of the quality of talent we are able to attract to AMD on the strength of our Fusion roadmap,” said Bergman. ”Manju brings prized expertise in developing the ecosystem for enabling breakthrough and heightened experiences on new architectures to AMD. As Manju and his team work with the ecosystem to usher in a new era of visual computing, we expect a wide range of industry leaders to embrace the future of accelerated computing through the combination of the GPU and CPU - a combination only AMD can deliver with its AMD Fusion technology.”