AMD New Hires: Dan McNamara from Intel, Joshua Friedrich and Brad McCredie from IBM
by Dr. Ian Cutress on January 21, 2020 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Enterprise
- GPUs
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.
43 Comments
View All Comments
Hulk - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
Hmm. Getting off a sinking ship?Santoval - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
The (hiring) tide has turned apparently..HStewart - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
It is kind of silly, when you call almost an unknown at Intel leaving getting off sinking ship - but when one of top AMD personal leaves, they call him traitor and not useful and such.Lets be fair folks no matter which company is they have turn over form employees. Like to increase one's position and pay. Raju has opportunity to help with one of biggest industry changes with Intel and it graphics units
Intel is not a sinking ship, just a ship change and improving it's gears for the future.
Hulk - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
Well it was actually supposed to be funny.Ian Cutress - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
I think he was referring to IBM here, given it's two people from POWER.sa666666 - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
It's obvious that the comment was intended for the IBM people both leaving POWER-related positions. And it was a joke. That you immediately made it into a fanboi AMD vs. Intel issue, and again do damage control for Intel, says more about your mindset than anyone else.bji - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
But you have to have a mind to have a mindset.Korguz - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
sa66666 thats hstewart for you... always defending his beloved intel.. even when no defence needs to be made....HStewart - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
Actually I am not, all I am saying is that it normal for technical people to move from company to company. Only thing that I would defend about Intel, is that they originally created the x86 processor and IBM mess things up in the early days.Korguz - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
oh but you ARE Hstewart. your reply was in response to hulks " Hmm. Getting off a sinking ship? " which YOU replied with " It is kind of silly, when you call almost an unknown at Intel leaving getting off sinking ship - but when one of top AMD personal leaves, they call him traitor and not useful and such. " which you were defending intel thinking hulks comment was intel is the sinking ship, which is was not, but IBM is the sinking ship...and what does " Only thing that I would defend about Intel, is that they originally created the x86 processor and IBM mess things up in the early days. " have to do with this ?? again.. defending intel when NO defense needs to be made.