BAD HARDWARE WEEK

Phil Hester, is senior vice president and chief technology officer (CTO) at AMD. He is responsible for setting the architectural and product strategies and plans for AMD’s microprocessor business. According to his biography posted on AMD’s website, he also chairs the AMD Technology Council, ensuring that product development, integration, and process organizations align technology capabilities with product direction.
Before joining AMD in September of 2005, Hester was co-founder and chief executive officer at Newisys and spent 23 years at IBM.
Phil Hester: More and more they figured out that Itanium is a ditch. Obviously, they copied our 64-bit extensions. A lot of the work we have done on virtualization they copied. A lot of the work we have done on power efficiency they copied. By doing Torrenza, we forced them to do what is their version of that idea. We don’t know a whole lot about [their version] yet, but, in general, they soon will be copying the idea of co-processors. So, every major platform innovation we came out within the last two years, in one form or the other, they copied.