AMD Fellow Chuck Moore dies of Pancreatic Cancer

[caveman-jim]

Chuck Moore, chief engineer of AMD's Bulldozer architecture, has passed away after battling Pancreatic Cancer, it was announced today. I met him briefly last year at AMD's inaugural Fusion Developer Summit, where he spoke with assembled world press about AMD Fusion system Architecture.

Chuck Moore, left, with Phil Rogers

Chuck achieved a long and distinguished career not only as a technology innovator and visionary, but also as a mentor and leader. He spent a large part of his career working at IBM on computer chips based on the POWER architecture. During this time Chuck completed a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas (UT) at Austin. He continued at IBM as Chief Engineer and project co-lead for the PowerPC 601 Microprocessor, and eventually led the POWER4 Chip Architecture project. He was also elected to the IBM Academy of Technology and was named an IBM Master Inventor.
In 2001 Chuck decided to venture out of his comfort zone to work at a startup, Chicory Systems, and after acquisition by Parthus Technologies (of Dublin, Ireland) in May 2001, became Vice President of Engineering.
Next he accepted a position as a Senior Research Fellow back at UT, where his work focused on scalable computer architectures and helped bridge technology innovation back into industry.
Then, in 2004, Chuck returned to the corporate world working for AMD in California, where he served as Chief Engineer of AMD's next-generation microprocessor core ("Bulldozer"), and achieved the final position of Corporate Fellow. As Technology Group CTO and Chairman of the Technology Advisory Board (TAB) Chuck was instrumental in setting AMD's technology and product direction.
In addition to being granted 31 US patents, with several others pending, Chuck was highly active in industry organizations like IEEE and ACM, and the annual Hot Chips symposium held at Stanford University.

His obituary is posted here.

[noko]

Wow! He was younger then me so was Jobs. Hope the best for his familily friends and co-workers. I am sure he will be missed by AMD and my condolences go to his family.

BullDozer is actually interesting and we will see if in the long term it was the right way to go. I am sure PileDriver was also worked by him as well which should be popping up in the near future. Some of the slides leaked or shown actually looks good with more changes then I expected.

To me Bulldozer was a compromised brought about by the troubles of Global Foundary which had to be released in a cut down state. Piledriver should indicate better the design principles if solid or not. Which will appear shortly in Trinity. So far Bulldozer has been very good for me in my system so for his work there I do appreciate.

So who is going to take up the reigns and push forward the architecture?

[jam2k]

RIP