AMD lands high-performance computing guru

AMD lands high-performance computing guru

SAN FRANCISCO—Advanced Micro Devices Inc. said Tuesday (Aug. 28) it lured another well-known semiconductor industry veteran to join the firm, continuing a recent run of high-profile talent recruiting.

AMD (Sunnyvale, Calif.) named John Gustafson formerly of rival Intel Corp.'s eXtreme Technologies Lab, to the role of senior Fellow and chief product architect for AMD's graphics chip business unit. Gustafson is a 35-year veteran of the computing industry whose achievements include describing what is known as Gustafson's Law. The law states that that computations involving arbitrarily large data sets can be efficiently parallelized, according to an entry on Wikipedia.org.

In addition to his time with Intel, Gustafson previous served as CEO at Massively Parallel Technologies and chief technology officer at ClearSpeed Technology, a high-performance computing company. Gustafson, 53, has also held key management and research positions at other companies including Sun Microsystems, Ames Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories.

AMD said Gustafson would be responsible for setting the technical vision for the AMD graphics business unit, driving the technology roadmap and platform for the company's Radeon and AMD FirePro product lines as well as new technology planning and execution of business objectives. Gustafson will be based in Sunnyvale, AMD said.

"With the growing importance of parallel compute in defining the computing experience, John brings the full package of industry experience and knowledge needed to help us expand and execute our AMD Radeon and AMD FirePro graphics technology programs, and will help forge an aggressive long-term roadmap that allows AMD to continue to lead and win with our gaming and virtualization technologies," said Matt Skynner, corporate vice president and general manager of AMD's graphics business unit, in a statement.

Next: Recruiting drive continues
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