VR-Zone

Following rumours around the internet, Manju Hegde has indeed joined AMD to lead the AMD Fusion Experience Program. Mr. Hegde was the co-founder and CEO of Ageia, creators of PhysX. Following Ageia's sale to Nvidia, Mr. Hegde has been Vice President - CUDA Technical Marketing at Nvidia.

Manju Hegde's services will be a valuable addition to AMD's Fusion department, as well as benefiting GPU Compute capability of ATI Radeon products, directly or indirectly.

AMD realizes that the major advantage of the first generation Fusion APU - Llano - is the GPU component. The CPU is based on aging Phenom II cores are likely to end up being far inferior to Intel's upcoming Sandy Bridge architecture, despite whatever optimizations 32nm may bring. Sandy Bridge is likely to be a stellar CPU with an adequate IGP - but gaming and compute seem beyond the capabilities of an Intel GPU in the short term, at least. This is where Llano excels - the GPU part - a DX11 GPU with upto 400 SP. Unfortunately, most applications even today do not make use of the GPU for most everyday applications. If AMD were to promote GPU Compute for a wide array of applications, it could surpass Sandy Bridge.

This work is no doubt very familiar to Mr. Hegde, who has been promoting Nvidia's own GPU Compute initiative, CUDA, at Nvidia. It is also a sign that AMD is aggressively beginning to promote Fusion, and Manju Hegde is a prized asset for AMD.

Reference: TechPowerUp