AMD announced respected industry veteran Mike Uhler, former CTO of MIPS, has joined the company as its first vice president of Accelerated Computing. Uhler has extensive experience developing advanced chip architectures and software for designs that combine multiple intellectual property (IP) blocks, as well as a deep understanding of customer requirements across a range of applications.

"We are excited to have Mike join AMD just as chip architectures, AMD software development and third-party development of related technologies are converging around our Accelerated Computing vision," said Phil Hester, senior vice president and chief technology officer for AMD. "Customers are asking for design innovations that apply hardware and software more directly toward a set of workloads, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. Mike furthers AMD's design leadership by applying that philosophy to our Accelerated Computing vision and I welcome him aboard."

AMD's Accelerated Computing research and development (R&D) programs focus on accelerating specific computing tasks and increasing overall platform performance-per-watt through the use of discrete co-processors and integration of on-chip accelerator cores.

"There is an important shift occurring in chip hardware and software to address the simultaneous changes in both the types of information being processed and the amount of data available for processing," said Uhler. "As a technologist, tackling these fundamental challenges inspires me and I look forward to working with AMD, its technology partners and its customers to address them."

AMD's vision for Accelerated Computing, unveiled at the close of AMD's acquisition of ATI in 2006, calls for the increasing use of accelerators to offload certain workloads from the CPU and process them at higher speeds and efficiency levels. This balancing of workload computation across multiple chips and cores, allowing each to do what it does best, stands to dramatically improve overall system performance and energy-efficiency, while also enabling systems to be highly optimized for a specific set of tasks based on the unique priorities of the particular end-user segment.

As vice president of Accelerated Computing at AMD, Uhler will apply a strong leadership background in a technology career spanning nearly 30 years. Prior to his role as CTO of MIPS, he served in various architecture and engineering roles at MIPS, as Silicon Graphics Inc.'s, director of engineering, and as a senior consulting engineer at Digital Equipment Corp. Uhler has been issued 34 patents in the areas of computer architecture and design, and holds a M.S. in computer science and a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Arizona.