There is always a fairly fluid movement of engineers in the companies we cover, but recently AMD has made a number of substantial hires into several of its biggest departments.

The newest hire as reported by AMD is of Dan McNamara, former Senior Vice President of Intel’s Network and Custom Logic Group (formerly the Programmable Solutions Group) for several years and one of Intel’s hires from the Altera acquisition, having spent 11 years at Altera. Dan is set to be AMD’s SVP and GM of the Server Business Unit. This means that Dan’s role will expand through to accelerate AMD’s EPYC portfolio in order to engage better with AMD’s customers about server solutions built through AMD hardware. This is a slight jump away from his previous focus of SoCs, ASICs, and FPGAs, which may make some readers think that AMD might be going in that direction: Forrest Norrod is still heading up AMD’s Enterprise, Embedded, and Semi-Custom Business Group. Dan’s hiring was the focus of a recent AMD blog post about promotions and new hires.

While not specifically promoted by AMD in that post, the company has also made two key hires, both of which have spent the last 20+ years at IBM. First on that list is Dr. Bradley (Brad) McCredie, which AMD actually hired back in June. Brad started at IBM back in 1991 focusing on packaging and mainframes, eventually having spent over 28 years at IBM which includes stints in POWER system development and also holding the position of President of the OpenPOWER Foundation. He is now set in a role in AMD as a Corporate Vice President of GPU Platforms, but specifically will cover the execution of AMD’s data center strategy covering CPU and GPU, reporting directly to Forrest Norrod.

The other IBM hire is Joshua (Josh) Friedrich, a 20-year IBM veteran with roles in POWER5 clock gating, the POWER6 frequency lead, the POWER7 Chip Power Lead, the POWER8 Chip Circuit Lead, POWER9 concept/high-level design and uncore development, and his final role was developing future POWER designs at IBM. Within AMD, Josh’s role is listed as Corporate Vice President, and a spokesperson states that Josh’s role is in CPU/GPU integration technologies, reporting to CTO Mark Papermaster. That isn’t a lot to go on, as it could cover APUs or something more unique, and on probing AMD for more information, they’ve confirmed that it’s more on the platform/solution side to create differentiated products.

There is one departure to note: Scott Aylor, the Corporate Vice President and GM of AMD’s Data Center Solutions Group, is currently on leave and is set to leave the company at a future date. Dan McNamara is taking over his role, and CRN is reporting that Aylor’s departure is not related.

Title image, from left to right: Brad McCredie, Dan McNamara, Josh Friedrich

Update 1/22: Our moles have done some extra digging, and AMD hired two other long-time IBM employees in 2019.

Greg Wetli, who AMD hired back in February 2019 to manage server processor validation, spent 31 years at IBM in POWER processor validation as well as different aspects of chip design and tooling as far back as POWER4.

Norman James, hired back in March 2019 as an AMD Fellow on system architecture, spent 23 years at IBM starting as a senior engineer on POWER6 before working through to lead engineer on IBM's Lead Engineer of Cognative Systems, focusing on deep learning and machine learning.