AMD Exec Departs Chip Maker for Rival NVIDIA

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The Wall Street Journal is reporting that AMD's corporate vice president of business development has left the company and taken a job with NVIDIA. Thanks to [H] forum member next-Jin for the heads up.

The executive overseeing Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s (AMD) relationship with videogame-console makers has left the company to join rival Nvidia Corp. (NVDA), taking with him years of experience in the competitive field. Bob Feldstein, who joined AMD when the company acquired graphics-chip maker ATI in 2006, has taken on the role of vice president of technology licensing at Nvidia. He most recently served as AMD's corporate vice president of business development and also led the company's Boston Design Center, which focuses on design engineering for AMD's various chips.
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Well... Is the changing of the old guard complete now at AMD?
 
Could be a case of the rat leaving a sinking ship........
 
I doubt it, they likely offered him pretty large incentives. The fact that he got all 3 next gen consoles exclusively is pretty amazing.
 
Thought I read there was some sort of agreement between AMD and Nvidia, or a law or something that would prevent the two companies from poaching each others talent. Guess not! That's a huge loss for AMD they should steal Nvidias driver dev team to make up for it :D
 
next-Jin said:
I doubt it, they likely offered him pretty large incentives. The fact that he got all 3 next gen consoles exclusively is pretty amazing.
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Allegedly, since none of the HW for the PS4 especially has been confirmed yet.
 
Yea. I signed a non compete for my job, but it means absolutely nothing here in WA.
 
This must be some NDA stuff that he had signed while at AMD. He can't divulge AMD's strategy fully to Nvidia.
 
AMD has all the next gen consoles?

when are they coming out?

With the stock at 52 week lows, might be a good time to buy some shares before the next line of consoles come out. AMD can't earn money fast enough.
 
Rory is cleaning house. Too bad none of his new execs can save AMD.
I'm particularly sad that AMD is pulling ATI under with them. ATI has been making some very competitve cards lately. Maybe they'll get cut loose somehow.
 
next-Jin said:
If you believe in the rumors floating around then yea.
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Didn't Nvidia make some big announcement that they wanted to "focus on PC gaming" and not bother with consoles anymore. So it's likely they'll all be AMD, unless Intel has done something worthwhile in the GPU department.

But the way it worked with the Xbox for AMD is that they were paid for the design, not the manafacture, so it wasn't really a giant earner, apparently.
 
next-Jin said:
If that is true someone horribly fucked up
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Depends, if AMD got essentially free R&D out of it they can use derivatives of elsewhere then maybe it was worth it for a company with competitively very limited development budgets.
 
next-Jin said:
If that is true someone horribly fucked up
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Well hasn't AMD sold all it's fabs now? So even if they wanted to now they couldn't actually make them anymore. But yes, free R&D meant it was probably worthwhile for them, and Microsoft got a good deal.
 
Jasec said:
Is this really the case?
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Speak of the Devil, I got this email this a.m. Thought I'd pass it along to the [H] readership for edification...

"...No--not at all. (I personally read the deal at AMD before signing off on it.) He get's *four* consoles--not three. Four--as in "all your fingers & thumb on one hand, minus one." And he also gets some controllers and a batch of games from our "Goodie" collection (a sort of employee "grab-bag" of games.) To help him avoid eye-strain, we threw in a 16" RCA CRT monitor as well--cool thing about that is that it weighs 865 lbs and is certified "monsoon-proof" in southeast Asia, and provided it doesn't get wet--cyclones can't budge it.)

This deal has been misconstrued by the misconstruers even more than usual. Here's the deal, just so it's understood. nVidia, Lord bless 'em, can't seem to license much these days or get it licensed. This next batch of world-crushing consoles is, of course, licensed courtesy of us, of AMD. Yeah--it's all our stuff. nVidia wants in there somewhere and we're trying to figure out something for them--I know, I know--everyone thinks we're selling each other's grandmothers to compete--but that's just the window-dressing we use to keep things interesting. Truth is we're like kissin' cousins--uh, well--uh, certainly not THAT kind of kissin' counsin--uh, movin' on...

OUR GUY is going to nVidia to help them sort out their intellectual property licensing landscape--it's a bloody mess, I don't mind telling you. He's going to set it up so that nVidia can license the stuff it needs to stay in business from us and then everybody's happy and everybody stays in business and everybody keeps his job. Capesh?

And, for the last, time, Howard, JHH is *not* my clone! Isn't that obvious from our eyebrows? Now, lay off that crap!"

--I don't know why I got this email. Certainly sheds some light on a few things, doesn't it?

WaltC
 
from the storry it's more like the move nvidia made is to get back in gaming console which is still big. if he's able to get microsoft and sony to get back in dealing with nvidia for their game consoles AMD be done for sure.
 
WaltC said:
Speak of the Devil, I got this email this a.m. Thought I'd pass it along to the [H] readership for edification...

"...No--not at all. ..."

--I don't know why I got this email. Certainly sheds some light on a few things, doesn't it?

WaltC
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I don't know, that e-mail sounds pretty fishy to me. I know Nvidia has many licensed deals in more fronts than AMD. So why exactly someone is saying Nvidia is having problems getting licensing just doesn't make sense. And more often than not it seems it has been AMD needing something that Nvidia developed (or that a company Nvidia bought developed). Nvidia also works a lot with private industry and on government projects on specialized computers which both have a whole additional set of headaches when it comes to licensing. So to say an Exec left to help sort out Nvidia's licencing mess, just doesn't seem to make sense.

Now as for the kissing cousins information, that certainly has some credence to it. If one company of the other were to fold up shop, then there would be some serious anti-trust implications for the surviving company. Also it is in the best interest of the companies to share some technology so that it is easier for game developers to make games using those technologies. Games that can only work for one side of the other can hurt sales for both companies, so they need to keep at least the core of their products similar (ie DirectX standards).

As for non-compete clauses, they aren't meaningless, but they aren't always utilized or executed either. It can be hard to prove at times that someone is actually stealing away ideas or technology, especially more senior members. Remember that the higher up you go, the further away from the actual design and architecture you get. You might be able to explain the strategy of how a company is doing something, but not the specific details. It is also generally not illegal for someone to leave a company and then compete for the same customers, that happens quite a bit. Likely the case here is either AMD doesn't feel threatened about Nvidia entering the console market, or that with the realignment they have assessed the console market isn't doing well enough for them. AMD basked in glory in the 6000 series cards, but the lastest 7000 series is taking a little bit of a beating from Nvidia's 600 series. They may just be focusing more on that market right now. If you think about it, while the consoles are an interesting market, new consoles only come out every 5-6 years whereas new generations of PC cards come out almost every year. Also the margins on the consoles has to be so low to be marketed as highly and aggressively as they are.

My final thoughts about all this is that this may be another sort of career change for Feldstein. Perhaps Nvidia wishes to leverage his experience working programs for consoles into directing their efforts into more of the tablet and mobile devices market. As more and more of these become popular and better games come out for them, perhaps he will help structure Nvidia's Tegra placement better.
 
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