AMD never misses an opportunity to slam
Intel’s high-end Itanium processor, but apparently that doesn’t mean they
don’t respect the considerable engineering resources devoted to its design.
AMD confirmed the latter point with its surprise hiring of Sam Naffziger,
one of Intel’s top Itanium designers and Intel Fellow.
Naffziger, the now ex-director of Itanium circuits and technology,
joined Intel
from HP where the Itanium was first developed.
He led the Itanium design team there for eight years. In addition to
Naffziger, AMD hired several other Intel employees from a Fort Collins,
Colo.-based Intel research facility, according to AMD
spokesperson Cathy Abbinanti.
AMD has a design center in nearby Longmont, Colo., but Abbinanti told
internetnews.com it’s also looking for office space in Fort Collins where
it plans to base a new design center.
For competitive reasons she declined
to elaborate on what Naffziger or the other new employees will be working on
specifically.
“We’re sorry to see someone like Sam go, but we feel confident in the
depth and experience of our Itanium development team,” said Intel spokesperson
Scott McLaughlin.
He said Naffziger was one of over 50 fellows at Intel;
four others have attained the senior fellow honor. The news of Naffziger’s
departure was first reported this week by the Real World Technologies Web
site.
“If Itanium becomes a success over the next five to 10 years, AMD might
be looking to have an alternative design,” Gartner analyst Martin Reynolds
told internetnews.com.
“AMD could take some of the attributes of
Intel’s Xeon and Itanium and work those into an Opteron design that would be
a true data center-class processor.”
The latest Itanium version in the works, the dual-core “Montecito,” has
suffered a series of delays that has pushed its release date from 2005 to
the second half of this year. It’s not clear whether this recent loss of
engineering talent will affect that timetable.
Earlier this month, HP announced it was pushing ahead with new versions of its Itanium-based Integrity server line based on a new
sx2000 chipset.
HP said its new chipset and other improvements to the
Integrity servers account for as much as a 30 percent improvement in
performance over earlier models.