we were very surprised to hear news coming around 11PM California time (the authors of these lines is currently recovering from its SAN-LAX-FRA-ZAG intercon flight) that Anand Mandapati and David Wang both resigned from Advanced Micro Devices.

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2012/8/17/anand-mandapati--david-wang-key-console-and-desktop-gpu-architects-leave-amd-.aspx

Destinations of these Top 0.1% engineers are not know [sic.], but we were lead to believe that both industry veterans wanted to take serious time off, after spending more than a decade with the company (ArtX, ATI Technologies and then AMD). We wish them all the best in their future endeavors. We have also contacted AMD PR department for the official statement and will amend the story after we receive it.

i am waiting for the AMD 'tell all' book

SUNNYVALE, Calif. —8/28/2012

AMD (NYSE: AMD) announced today that the visionary behind Gustafson’s Law, John Gustafson, has joined the company as senior fellow and chief product architect, Graphics Business Unit. In this role, Gustafson will set the technical vision for the AMD graphics business unit, driving the technology roadmap and platform for the AMD Radeon™ and AMD FirePro™ product lines as well as new technology planning and execution of business objectives. Gustafson will be based in Sunnyvale and will help evangelize AMD graphics leadership internally and externally.

“Our industry-leading graphics technology predicates that we consistently deliver the most differentiated and superior graphics processor unit (GPU) architectures and products - without compromise,” said Matt Skynner, corporate vice president and general manager, AMD Graphics. “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.”

Gustafson is a 35-year veteran of the computing industry. He joins AMD from Intel, where he headed the company’s eXtreme Technologies Lab, conducting cutting-edge research on energy-efficient computing and memory, as well as optical, energy and storage technologies. Prior to that, he served as CEO at Massively Parallel Technologies and CTO at ClearSpeed Technology, a high-performance computing company. Gustafson has also held key management and research positions at numerous companies including Sun Microsystems, Ames Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories.

In 1988, Gustafson wrote Reevaluating Amdahl's Law ...

AMD is copying Nvidia. They are changing the direction of their company. Nvidia hired Bill Daley as chief scientist three years ago - from Academia. AMD is three years behind. If they can survive, they may do OK. It's the 'meantime' that has observers concerned.