NVIDIA Hires Phil Rogers After Being With AMD For 21 Years

AMD has been making some internal changes in recent weeks with the most notable being that they reorganized itself to create the Radeon Technologies Group so that their graphics division and its employees were together again in one single group. AMD selected Raja Koduri to head the new Radeon Technologies Group and this move was seen as largely positive. The not so good news was that CPU architect Jim Keller left AMD after he wrapped his work on AMD’s upcoming Zen processor architecture. Jim Keller has worked off and on at AMD since 1998, but has been known to change companies to take on new challenges, so it isn’t a big shock that he left AMD after completing Zen. AMD hired back Jim Keller three years ago after he did a brief stent at Apple where he was on the team that designed the Apple A4 and A5 SoCs that were used on the iPhone 4, 4S, iPad and iPad 2.

AMD believes that Zen will offer a 40% IPC boost over their current Excavator CPU architecture with support for simultaneous multi-threading. AMD is rumored to be launching Zen FX series processors first with hopes that gamers will flock to them due to the high core count, clock speeds and it being the first AMD platform to support DRR4 memory and so on. Many see AMD’s upcoming Zen architecture as a must win and some are even going as far as saying it will be AMD’s last chance to make a meaningful stand against Intel. The 14nm AMD Zen processor series isn’t expected to come out until 2016 and by then Intel will have likely moved beyond their 6th Gen Skylake processors and will be competing with Kaby Lake.

Losing a well known CPU architect like Jim Keller that helped birth the AMD K8 microarchitecture with the x86-64 instruction set and HyperTransport interconnect was a blow, but we learned overnight that AMD Corporate Fellow Phil Rogers has also left AMD. Unlike Mr. Keller, Phil Rogers has been at AMD/ATI for 21 years straight and has been a fellow for the past eight years.

In recent years, Rogers has been responsible for helping build and grow the software ecosystem behind AMDs heterogeneous computing products and the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA). He was one of the folks that helped get the HSA Foundation off the ground and was the first president of the organization that includes members like ARM, Imagination, Mediatek, Qualcomm and Samsung. AMD’s loss of Rogers certainly hurts, but it shouldn’t be a surprise to learn that he jumped ship and was hired by rival NVIDIA to become their Chief Server Architect. In his new roll it is believed that he’ll help NVIDIA with their NVLink CPU and GPU interconnect on the upcoming Pascal GPU architecture that is due out next year. This makes sense as NVIDIA is likely looking to move to a more heterogeneous computing setup and Phil Rogers certainly knows that market.

What does this mean for AMD? Is this the beginning of Brain Drain or just two high profile employees that just happened to leave at the same time?