14 DAY TRIAL // Advanced Micro Devices hasn't been the bearer of good news lately, not counting the hype raised around the Malta Radeon HD 7990 graphics card, so we can safely say that its latest staff choice is a good thing.
What the Sunnyvale, California company did was rehire a certain renowned graphics expert that it lost to Apple back in 2009.
The returning engineer is none other than Raka Koduri, who was one of the leading designers of discrete graphics chips at ATI Technologies.
When AMD acquired ATI, the man became a prominent member of the AMD graphics products group and stayed there for eight years.
He was one of the main responsibles for GPGPU (general-purpose computing on graphics processing units), among other things.
Now that he has returned, he will become the corporate vice president of visual computing, reporting to Mark Papermaster, the chief technology officer and former IBM and Apple executive himself.
“Maintaining AMD’s position as a leader in visual computing is the key to our long-term success. As one of the industry’s foremost experts in developing leading-edge visual computing solutions, Raja brings exceptional vision and strength to AMD’s world-class engineering leadership team,” said Mr. Papermaster in a statement.
“Given his past record of success, Raja will help AMD lead the way in visual and accelerated computing and ensure we continue developing the industry-leading graphics IP that forms the foundation for our future growth.”
Koduri is bound to sink his arms elbow-deep in the next architectural developments. Given the time frame of such endeavors though, his ideas probably won't turn into commercially-available products before 2016-2017.
Now we just have to wait and see if AMD's CEO Rory Read hires any more big names. Over the past year, he definitely gathered a few famous people, but he fired just as many while he was at it.