AMD’s Design Center Bait and Switch

Earlier this year, we broke the news that some of Intel's Montecito design team in Fort Collins, including an Intel Fellow, had left and joined AMD. The original goal was to start a design center with a core group of 30 engineers (mostly concentrating on circuit, rather than architectural design) and depending on the available talent pool, possibly expand to 200 engineers. While Fort Collins is hardly Silicon Valley, there is a strong legacy of engineering in the area. HP is a local heavyweight and has a strong influence on the area; LSI has two facilities in the area (one in Colorado Springs, one in Fort Collins), and Intel’s own Fort Collins group, which was partially inherited from HP, has a reputation for aggressive circuit design, is in the same neighborhood.

Late last week, AMD publicly announced that they were shuttering their Longmont, Colorado design center, which mainly focused on embedded designs, particularly the Geode line. As others have reported, some employees will be redeployed to other groups within the company. The obvious question that went unasked is “where are these employees headed?” The answer to that reveals something rather interesting afoot.

One of our eagle eyed readers spotted a report in a local Colorado newspaper that sheds some light on the matter. According to AMD, around 75 employees (out of 180) from Longmont will move to Fort Collins, and the company has now decided to press ahead and pull together 200 designers and support personal. AMD has aggressively advertised in the area (including parts of Wyoming) for qualified electrical engineers and seems quite determined to build a presence in the community. The Fort Collins design group will be implementing high performance x86 MPUs, and is currently in need of quite a few senior engineers, as well as a manager for the entire site. It is unclear whether Fort Collins will be responsible for architecture and implementation, or just the latter, although that likely depends a great deal upon what kind of talent AMD can find.

While it does not appear that AMD has a complete team in place by any stretch of the imagination, they are certainly well on their way to having a fifth design team, complementing the existing ones in Austin, Sunnyvale, Boston and Bangalore. The real question will be, how long does it take them to get up a full team in place, and what are they working on?