14 DAY TRIAL // Advanced Micro Devices has just announced the appointment of former CTO of MIPS Mike Uhler as vice president of the company's Accelerated Computing sector. Uhler is a company veteran in developing advanced chip architectures and software for designs. The AMD Accelerated Computing programs research methods of accelerating computing tasks by using additional discrete co-processors and integration of on-chip accelerator cores.
"There is an important shift occurring in chip hardware and software to address the simultaneous changes in both the types of information being processed and the amount of data available for processing", said Uhler. "As a technologist, tackling these fundamental challenges inspires me and I look forward to working with AMD, its technology partners and its customers to address them."
AMD has been heavily working on creating efficient accelerators since the ATI acquisition in June 2006 and aims at taking additional loads off the processor and pass them for processing at higher speeds and efficiency levels. The distribution of tasks on a network of chips and cores is done selectively and each specialized unit gets only the data it can process most efficiently. This boosts the whole system performance at lower energy costs.
"We are excited to have Mike join AMD just as chip architectures, AMD software development and third-party development of related technologies are converging around our Accelerated Computing vision", said Phil Hester, senior vice president and chief technology officer for AMD. "Customers are asking for design innovations that apply hardware and software more directly toward a set of workloads, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. Mike furthers AMD's design leadership by applying that philosophy to our Accelerated Computing vision and I welcome him aboard."
Uhler has about 30 years of experience in the field and has served in various architecture and engineering roles at MIPS, as Silicon Graphics Inc.'s, director of engineering and as senior consulting engineer at Digital Equipment Corp. He is at the same time, the owner of 34 patents regarding computer architecture.