AMD Hires Intel Engineer As Server CTO

Advanced Micro Devices has tapped an engineer from Intel to be the CTO and vice president of its server unit.

AMD officials announced on 23 Aug. that Donald Newell, who spent 16 years with Intel, most recently as senior principle engineer heading up the giant chip maker’s SoC (system on a chip) and data centre networking architecture groups within Intel Labs, will now help mold AMD’s server roadmap.

Newell will report to Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s Products Group.

“Don Newell brings a strong combination of leadership skills, engineering and design expertise, and strategic direction,” Bergman said in a statement. “We’re fortunate to have Don on board as we prepare for the delivery of the ‘Bulldozer’ core in our AMD Opteron processors, scheduled for launch in 2011.”

Bulldozer And Bobcat

Bulldozer is AMD’s upcoming processor architecture, and will be the chip maker’s first new microprocessor architecture in several years. At the Hot Chips Conference starting on 24 Aug. at Stanford University in Santa Clara, Calif., AMD officials will give greater details about both Bulldozer and “Bobcat,” a new core architecture for ultrathin notebooks and other smaller devices.

The Bulldozer microarchitecture will be included in new Opteron server chips that will scale up to 16 cores, and chips with eight cores for PCs will come out later, according to AMD.

Data Centre Technologies

During his time at Intel , his work with SoC and data centre technologies touched on everything from cloud computing to handheld devices, and also headed up the development of Intel’s IOAT (I/O Acceleration Technology), which improves system performance by enhancing the flow of data within and across systems.

Newell has more than 20 patents filed, according to AMD.