Advanced Micro Devices has tapped an engineer from Intel to be the CTO and vice president of its server unit.
AMD officials announced Aug. 23 that Donald Newell will now help mold AMD’s server road map. Newell, who spent 16 years with Intel, most recently as senior principal engineer heading up the giant chip maker’s SoC (system on a chip) and data center networking architecture groups in Intel Labs, 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 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 that ran Aug. 22-24 at Stanford University, AMD officials will give greater details about both Bulldozer and “Bobcat,” a new core architecture for ultrathin notebooks and other devices.
Bobcat is also due out in 2011.
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.
During his time at Intel, his work with SoC and data center technologies touched on everything from cloud computing to handheld devices, and also headed up the development of Intel’s I/OAT (I/O Acceleration Technology), which improves system performance by enhancing the flow of data within and across systems.
Newell has filed more than 20 patents, according to AMD.