While there is no statement from his new employer, former colleagues such as Pat Moorhead have congratulated Demers abou his new gig as vice president of engineering via Facebook.
The reasons for Qualcomm's new hire is apparently the Adreno graphics team, which has its origin in AMD's/ATI's Imageon business, a business that was sold to Qualcomm in January 2009 for $65 million. Demers' task is to manage the old and new team and crank out a competitive graphics solutions, an increasingly important task as Imagination technologies is prepping its Series 6 PowerVR architecture and Nvidia is gaining traction in the ARM processor field.
Qualcomm will also aim for a big chunk of the Windows 8 ARM business and Demers' expertise in the PC market will certainly help.