Interesting news is crossing the ocean today as we learn that Richard Huddy, who has previously had stints at NVIDIA, ATI, AMD and most recently, Intel, is teaming up with AMD once again. Richard brings with him years of experience and innovation in the world of developer relations and graphics technology. Often called "the Godfather" of DirectX, AMD wants to prove to the community it is taking PC gaming seriously.
The official statement from AMD follows:
AMD is proud to announce the return of the well-respected authority in gaming, Richard Huddy. After three years away from AMD, Richard returns as AMD's Gaming Scientist in the Office of the CTO – he'll be serving as a senior advisor to key technology executives, like Mark Papermaster, Raja Koduri and Joe Macri. AMD is extremely excited to have such an industry visionary back. Having spent his professional career with companies like NVIDIA, Intel and ATI, and having led the worldwide ISV engineering team for over six years at AMD, Mr. Huddy has a truly unique perspective on the PC and Gaming industries.
Mr. Huddy rejoins AMD after a brief stint at Intel, where he had a major impact on their graphics roadmap. During his career Richard has made enormous contributions to the industry, including the development of DirectX and a wide range of visual effects technologies. Mr. Huddy’s contributions in gaming have been so significant that he was immortalized as ‘The Scientist’ in Max Payne (if you’re a gamer, you’ll see the resemblance immediately).
Kitguru has a video from Richard Huddy explaining his reasoning for the move back to AMD.
Source: Kitguru.net
This move points AMD in a very interesting direction going forward. The creation of the Mantle API and the debate around AMD's developer relations programs are going to be hot topics as we move into the summer and I am curious how quickly Huddy thinks he can have an impact.
I have it on good authority we will find out very soon.
Perhaps not as exciting as
Perhaps not as exciting as Jim Keller’s return, but it’s still great to see AMD picking up talent, especially as their very survival was questioned not too long ago.
http://scalibq.wordpress.com/
http://scalibq.wordpress.com/2012/05/03/richard-huddy-comments-on-my-blog/
“He wasn’t afraid of ‘collateral damage’ either. As I briefly mentioned in other posts, Huddy was involved heavily in the 3DMark05 soap between ATi and nVidia, regarding the use of DST/PCF technology, while not using 3Dc technology. Huddy did a lot of damage to FutureMark here, severely hurting their image as an independent supplier of benchmarks by implying that FutureMark was in bed with nVidia. Perhaps the worst part is that he DIDN’T mention that FutureMark worked with ATi developer relations just as hard as with nVidia. So ATi had their share of input in the choice of shaders and rendering techniques in the benchmark as well. In fact, the choice not to include 3Dc was done with the consent of ATi, for technical reasons. Not at all what Huddy was implying. I don’t think FutureMark ever fully recovered from the damage that Huddy did to their image.”
http://scalibq.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/amdrichard-huddy-need-to-lie-about-tessellation/
Oh noes! Futuremark, a
Oh noes! Futuremark, a private corporation doing non-essential stuff(of which there are already a lot of different options beside them) are crying because a long time ago, there was a storm in a teacup.
Also, the whole “I don’t think FutureMark ever fully recovered from the damage that Huddy did to their image.” is HILARIOUS.
Really? Ask most people who use Futuremark and I’d be surprised if even 1% know about any random scuffle that happened years ago.
You sound like an embittered person who had a personal stake in that conflict or at least someone who knows someone else who did.
Jim Keller is more important,
Jim Keller is more important, AMD needs a new full fat x86 microarchitecture with SMT, great single threaded performance, and that does not have any bandwidth issues, and can work fine on Samsung’s 14nm process node, that Global Foundries is licensing from Samsung, a 14nm process that Samsung got help from IBM in creating, so IBM could get a cheep source of fab capacity for their Power/Power8 processors, which by the way, is the exact same reasoning for AMD getting an x86 license in the first place, so IBM could have a competitive low cost supply x86 parts for the IBM PC that started the whole x86 on the PC ball rolling in the first place!
But the x86 market is going to have some tough competition on the high end from Power8, just like x86 has from ARM on the low end, the Power8 ISA/IP is up for licensing similar to the ARM ISA/IP. I am sure Samsung is looking at Power8, as is Google and Many others. The desktop and high end laptop may be the only market where x86 may still be used in the coming years.
I have been a fan of Jim
I have been a fan of Jim Keller since the Alpha chip back when I worked on the Tandem Non-Stop I in the 80’s. I do believe with Jim and his staff starting with a “Blank Sheet of Paper” to redesign cores for x86 and ARM it is a perfect time to have Richard Huddy return. Possible new insights into how the new APU architecture could and should evolve may be gained from this new collaboration. All this with the help of Samsung getting AMD to 14nm FinFET points to a very rosy future.