By Don Clark
Manju Hegde, a hardware expert with a track record in startups and academia, has been helping to lead one of the most high-profile initiatives of chip maker Nvidia. In a sharp about-face, he’s decided to lead a related and equally ambitious quest at rival Advanced Micro Devices.
Hegde is best-known in the videogame world for founding a company called Ageia Technologies, which developed software and specialized chips for simulating physics–the animated motions, collisions and explosions that make videogames lively. Nvidia purchased the company in 2008.
After the deal, Hegde became involved in Nvidia’s CUDA program, a term that refers to the company’s stated goal to turn its graphics chips into more general-purpose computing engines. His most recent title was vice president of technical marketing for CUDA.
AMD, since its 2006 purchase of the graphics chip company ATI Technologies, has endorsed the same basic idea. But the company is better known for competing with Intel in selling x86 microprocessors, the chips that run general-purpose software in most of the world’s computers.
AMD’s own big idea is called Fusion, a term that refers to putting the x86 functions along with graphics and other circuitry on a single piece of silicon. At AMD, he will hold the title of vice president of the Fusion Experience program, which among other things will help galvanize software developers to exploit the technology.
Why did Hegde prefer one quest to another? He says AMD had that key weapon–the x86 technology–that is not currently in Nvidia’s arsenal.
“Nvidia is a great company to work for,” he says. “It’s like a big startup; they move extremely fast. But the opportunity to having all the processing capability on one chip was too good to miss.”
Hegde, 53 years old, was originally educated in India. But he went on to get degrees that included a doctorate from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in computer information and control engineering. He was on the faculty of Washington University during the period he ran Ageia, he says. Other startup activities including serving as co-founder of Celox Networks Inc., a maker of network processors that didn’t survive the dot-com bust, he says.
An Nvidia spokesman declined comment on Hegde’s departure.
