14 DAY TRIAL // It's quite interesting to watch just how some of the world's biggest IT companies tend to rely on each other's former employees for building new and innovative products, the latest case of such an exchange we've caught word of being related to the best-known rivals in the chip market, AMD
and Intel.
So, the starting point of this whole story is the fact that AMD has recently revealed the fact that it has appointed Sam Naffziger, who has 22 years of experience in developing microprocessors and actively involved in in circuit design and power management technologies, to Corporate Fellow for his leadership in power management technology.
In fact, AMD's statement reveals the fact that, since joining AMD in 2006, Mr. Naffziger has been “a leader at the company in high-frequency, low-power circuit design, including significant contributions to the new “Bulldozer” x86 processing core scheduled to come to market in the first half of this year.”
But that's not all, since Naffziger has also been the “primary architect behind a number of key power reduction and management technologies being deployed AMD’s upcoming processors codenamed “Llano”, “Orochi” and “Trinity.””
This announcement by AMD wouldn't seem so interesting if it weren't for Mr. Naffziger's past employers, namely HP and Intel, where the researcher also had some very important contributions on the development of the Itanium processors.
Naturally, this sort of thing happens all the time in the industry, top researchers being “drawn-in” with all sorts of incentives (typically, of the financial kind) in order to change sides and share some of the knowledge (and know-how) they've built-up along the way, but it's quite interesting to see just what (or better said, who) some of the world's best-known computing platforms have in common.
Which leaves us wondering, could we actually play a little game of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”, adapter for the world of CPUs and starring some different figures?