Another Long-time Graphics Leader Leaves AMD

Just weeks after AMD's CTO of graphics Eric Demers left the company to pursue other opportunities, the company's Director of the Client Technology Unit, Godfrey Cheng, has also jumped ship after serving 12 years.

Cheng was recently part of AMD's high-profile Llano launch. But long before that, he was one of the principle players behind ATI's All-in-Wonder series of graphics cards and TV tuners which debut in 1996. He headed the project from 1998 to 2006, and then moved over to gaming technologies like Avivo and CrossFire for a year as ATI's Director of Marketing, Platform Technologies.

In 2006 he also became AMD's Director of Technical Marketing, Graphics Products where he was involved in roadmap and technical marketing for 3D graphics, video, display, power and audio technologies. He was also a technology and product evangelist responsible for benchmarking and hardware certification.

As AMD's Director of Client Technology Unit, Client Division in 2010, he managed and drove technologies such as x86, parallel compute, video and graphics for AMD's PC Client group. He also managed the competitive analysis team, the AMD performance lab, and contributed to AMD's M&A strategies.

"Marketing and Product Executive with extensive experience with PC products with focus in the areas of CPU, graphics, and video technologies," reads his LinkedIn summary. "Key strengths include product management, technology management, product marketing, extensive business development and negotiation experience working with all key Original Equipment Manufacturers, Distributors, Retailers and ecosystem partners. Passion for developing and productizing technologies that literally change the world."

The reasons for his departure is officially unknown, but he follows another former ATI employee (Demers). Rumor has it that he parted ways with AMD because it became clear the company wasn't going to follow Rick Bergman's ideas for how to best leverage AMD's graphics and APU assets. AMD has reportedly acknowledged the departure, and understands the possible concern for his timing after the launch of the GTX 680 and Demer's departure earlier this year.

"The company affirmed that it remains entirely committed to its GPU technology at all market segments," reports HotHardware. "AMD believes its New Zealand and 'Sea Islands' architectures will be a potent challenge for Nvidia's GK104 and noted that the Radeon HD 7000 family competes very well against Kepler's reduced GPGPU performance."

So far AMD has not released an official announcement.