Phil Rogers, a senior Corporate Fellow with AMD, and one of its longest serving employees, left the company for rival NVIDIA. He was with AMD/ATI for 21 years. Rogers joined AMD in 1994, and was promoted to Corporate Fellow back in 2007. One of his key contributions to the company was seeing the potential in integrating CPU and GPU into one powerful chip, under the Fusion initiative. In his new job at NVIDIA, Rogers will be Chief Software Architect for compute servers. This is a big deal.

NVIDIA is investing a lot of money into cloud computing (as in computing on the cloud), in which people will not only play games rendered on the cloud, but also more serious applications based on deep-learning and AI could be cloud-driven. With the right cloud computing service subscribed, even a tiny personal device like a smartwatch can crunch complex problems. As a chipmaker with high TFLOP/s GPGPU chips, NVIDIA is eyeing itself a big slice of the emerging industry, and wants the best hands on the job. NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has a personal interest in compute servers, and he has entrusted one of its most important jobs to Rogers. This is the second major event of attrition by innovative people at AMD. Recently, CPU architect Jim Keller left AMD after completing a stint at designing its new "Zen" micro-architecture.

AMD announced the appointment of Phil Rogers to AMD Corporate Fellow. In this role, Rogers will continue developing advanced architectures and extend AMD's software capabilities. Rogers' emphasis on enhancing graphics processing unit (GPU) and central processing unit (CPU) interoperability through software and hardware innovations plays a central role in delivering performance optimization and power reduction advances for graphics and computing. Corporate Fellow is the highest level of technical recognition at AMD, and is reserved for those who impact AMD's business opportunities and technical breadth by providing a high degree of expertise, knowledge, creativity, and tactical and strategic direction.