AMD merges processor and graphics biz
ATI finally allowed into the house
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AMD and ATI are officially tying the knot after living together in corporate sin for nearly three years.
The company's formerly disparate processor and graphics businesses will merge into one amidst a major reorganization for AMD that will spawn four new operating units. AMD says the goal is to streamline dreaming up chip architectures across the company as well as creating clearer lines of leadership from the firm.
(Also, maybe the company's website won't have that silly drop-down menu next to the search bar where you have to select either AMD or ATI. So annoying).
As part of the re-org, Randy Allen - who was in charge of AMD's business of making chips for servers and workstation PCs, an employee since 2001, and a fellow who's always been out there pitching the company's merch to the press - announced he's leaving the company.
AMD said it's still going to drive its tech forward by discrete GPUs and CPUs, but will now be "attacking the market as "one AMD."
Until AMD boss Dirk Meyer contradicts the very claim with his prepared statement:
"The next generation of innovation in the computing industry will be grounded in the fusion of microprocessor and graphics technologies," Meyer stated. "With these changes, we are putting the right organization in place to help enable the future of computing."
AMD's new, dare we say, quad-core operations are as follows:
- Rick Bergman — formerly charged with the company's GPU product group — is helming a new unified products group. He'll be in charge of fusing the GPU and CPU businesses together. This is clearly the biggest change of the restructure and arguably a long time coming. Among the teams under Bergman will be the Processor Solutions Engineering folks, headed by Jeff VerHeul.
- There's also an Advanced Technology Group led by Chekib Akrout, which will focus on coming up with future tech.
- Next is AMD's marketing group, led by Nigel Dessau, in charge of synergizing the go-to market and other forms of sales division whalesong.
- Finally, there's a customer group led by Emilo Ghilardi who'll deal with putting on a pleasant face for the unwashed masses.
The company didn't provide a reason for Allen's departure, but called him an important engineering leader who's "played a key role in many of AMD's most significant achievements in recent years."
AMD has recently been struggling to find financial footing as it faces a gigantic rival in Intel and a crap economy. Hopefully, some corporate streamlining will make for stronger, faster competition against Chipzilla. ®
COMMENTS
@Mark Boothroyd
"But for general tasks, even ignoring the lack of x86 commands, GPU's simply don't have the grunt or capabilities that a standard CPU has. An OS running on a GPU would run like Vista on a 200MHz 486!"
They made 200MHz 486 chips? Thats news to me.
/Blue man because research is a wonderful thing
@General processor on graphics chip?
GPU's are too specialist, essentially just uber maths co-processes geared around GFX.
But for general tasks, even ignoring the lack of x86 commands, GPU's simply don't have the grunt or capabilities that a standard CPU has. An OS running on a GPU would run like Vista on a 200MHz 486!
Although other math intensive tasks can be done by GPU's, such as protein analysis (folding at home via CUDA on nVidia as one example), and now more recently hardware physics acceleration via PhysX on recent nVidia cards (8, 9, and 200 series cards)(I believe ATI/AMD are also working on something similar for their cards now as well).
I'd still rather have......
An AMD Processor and an nvidia graphics card in my machine.
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