With only two major players in the dedicated GPU industry, it's not unusual for the employees of Nvidia and AMD to partake in the occasional bout of musical ship jumping. But every now then there's a big move, and unfortunately for the embattled AMD, today it's the one losing the talent. Phil Rogers, AMD Corporate Fellow and president of the Heterogeneous System Architecture Foundation, has left the company after 21 years to join rival Nvidia as its "Compute Server Architect."

Rogers is the second high-profile loss for AMD in as many months, with ace CPU architect Jim Keller (regarded by many as the brains behind the upcoming Zen CPU microarchitecture) having recently left the company. 500 other staff are expected to be let go as the company struggles to return to profitability.

As one of AMD's high-ranking corporate fellows, Rogers' was instrumental in the development of HSA—a technology that integrates the CPU and GPU on the same bus, with shared memory and task queuing/scheduling—and the software (or lack thereof) behind it. He also helped found the HSA Foundation, a consortium made up of the likes of ARM, Imagination, Mediatek, Qualcomm, and Samsung, with an aim to push HSA mainstream. Prior to his work on HSA, Rogers worked at ATI helping to develop Radeon GPUs from the 2000-series up, before the company was gobbled up by AMD.

The loss of Rogers will be a blow to AMD's plans to grow HSA, which hasn't exactly been bestowed with a wealth of compatible software so far. While Nvidia isn't part of the HSA Foundation, Rogers may have been brought on because of his HSA chops. The company is set to launch its Pascal architecture next year, which boasts its NVLink CPU and GPU interconnect, allowing for heterogeneous computing setups that are similar to what AMD's been pushing out for years.

There's no word yet on who will replace Rogers, but an announcement is expected to be made on AMD's upcoming earnings call later this month.