DailyTech - AMD Picks up 9 High Profile Itanium Engineers
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=1521
> AMD has managed to wrangle away nine of Intel's top processor engineers. Samuel Naffziger and his eight colleagues were apart of the design team that helped to develop the Itanium server processor.
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> Naffzier was an Intel Fellow and the Director of Itanium Circuits and Technology. He and his colleagues have been with Intel ever since Hewlett Packard abandoned Itanium development at the end of 2004.
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> As is the case with the typical PR machines, Intel doesn't see the move as a big blow to its Itanium development even though Naziffiger has been instrumental in the launches of McKinley and Montecito.
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> The real question is what the team at AMD’s Fort Collins design center focus on. Considering that most of the engineers in the area have worked on PA-RISC or Itanium, it seems reasonable to expect that they will concentrate on the server side, rather than on desktop or mobile MPUs. Either way, this should open up some interesting possibilities for AMD, and some new opportunities for Colorado residents.
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> With K8L due to be released in 2007, this latest development is an indication that the competition between AMD and Intel just became more intense.