AMD today announced the appointment of Manju Hegde as corporate vice president, Fusion Experience Program. A renowned parallel and visual computing innovator, Hegde previously served as vice president of CUDA Technical Marketing at NVIDIA before joining AMD to lead the AMD Fusion Experience Program, an initiative focused on identifying innovative computing solutions and applications poised to take full advantage of the forthcoming AMD Fusion family of Accelerated Processing Units (APU). Hegde reports to Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, AMD Products Group.

"We are thrilled to be able to attract an experienced industry leader like Manju Hegde to the AMD team, a sign of the quality of talent we are able to attract to AMD on the strength of our Fusion roadmap," said Bergman. "Manju brings prized expertise in developing the ecosystem for enabling breakthrough and heightened experiences on new architectures to AMD. As Manju and his team work with the ecosystem to usher in a new era of visual computing, we expect a wide range of industry leaders to embrace the future of accelerated computing through the combination of the GPU and CPU -- a combination only AMD can deliver with its AMD Fusion technology."

Prior to joining NVIDIA, Hegde was chief executive officer and co-founder of AGEIA Technologies Inc., during which he drove their quest to bring a heightened physics experience to consumers. Before joining AGEIA, Hegde served as chief technology officer and co-founder of Celox Networks Inc., and chief scientist of Minmax Technologies, Inc. Hegde has also held a number of departmental leadership, professorial and research roles at respected universities, including Louisiana State University and Washington University in St. Louis, and his work has been published in more than 30 research journals and publications.

Hegde received a Ph. D. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in computer information and control engineering, along with a master's degree from the University of Toledo in statistics, a master of management studies' degree from the University of Bombay in finance, and a bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, in electrical engineering.