Qualcomm hires former AMD CTO, makes 'em pay for dropping mobile
Qualcomm is hiring AMD's former CTO Eric Demers to help the company produce a blockbuster mobile graphics chip. It needs the silicon for its big push for smartphone dominance (and tablets running Windows RT) in the face of strong competition from Imagination Technologies' Series 6 PowerVR and NVIDIA's Tegra 3. Demers' first job will be to merge Qualcomm's in-house Adreno team with ATI's Imageon mobile graphics chip team, which AMD flogged off for $65 million back in 2009 -- a move Sunnyvale is probably regretting now that it too is trying to get its hardware into mobile devices, unless it included a do-over clause in the sales contract.
