AMD poaches senior Intel engineer

By Steve Malone

Posted on 30 Mar 2006 at 10:53

Chip manufacturer AMD has confirmed that it has poached one of Intel's senior engineers. Intel fellow Samuel Naffziger has been hired to help design a new generation of chips as a Senior Fellow. Naffziger is said to have taken eight of his colleagues with him.

Naffziger, an Intel Fellow and Director of Itanium Circuits and Technology joined the company from Hewlett Packard after the company said it was pulling out of Itanium development at the end of 2004. It is thought he was at Intel for less than a year.

While Intel is naturally playing down the defection, the loss of Naffziger will be a blow. He was a key figure in the development of a number of recent Intel products including the 'McKinley' Itanium and the dual core, dual threaded Itanium processor 'Montecito'. The latter has been delayed almost a year due to design problems with a dynamic feedback mechanism, codenamed Foxton.

AMD will be setting up its own research facilities in Fort Collins, a small city in Colorado, which is where most of Intel's Itanium R&D is carried out. Given that most of the engineers in the area will have experience in the development of PA-RISC and the Itanium, we can be fairly sure than AMD will be carrying out development of a server product along the same lines.

AMD is initially looking for 30 designers in the Fort Collins facility, but will hope to increase the staffing levels to 200 if it can generate sufficient interest.

The defection of Naffziger and his team is the latest example of companies willing to tempt away key personnel from rivals in order to gain a technology advantage despite employment contracts which bar them from working on similar projects for competitors. Last year, for example, Microsoft sued Google after the search giant poached Kai-Fu Lee, former corporate VP of Microsoft's Natural Interactive Services Division to help develop its R&D Lab in China.