Samuel Naffziger is an American electrical engineer who has been employed at Advanced Micro Devices in Fort Collins, Colorado since 2006. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2014 for his leadership in the development of power management and low-power processor technologies.[1] He is also the Senior Vice President and Product Technology Architect at AMD.[2]

Sam Naffziger
Born
Samuel Naffziger
Alma materCalifornia Institute of Technology (BS)
Stanford University (MSc)
EmployerAMD

Education edit

Naffziger received a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology and a Master of Science in computer engineering from Stanford University.[3]

Career edit

Early career edit

For eight years, Naffziger led the Itanium design team at Hewlett-Packard before moving to Intel in 2002.[4] At Intel, Naffziger played a leading role in the introduction of two major Itanium models at the International Solid State Circuits Conference, the McKinley processor in 2002 and Montecito in 2005.[5]

2006-present: Advanced Micro Devices edit

Naffziger was an architect lead on AMD's Ryzen processors that launched in March 2017.[6] He was the lead advocate for AMD's Ryzen and Epyc lines to move to a modular, chiplet-based approach.[7] Towards the end of 2017, Naffziger began to lead the AMD graphics team in bringing a chiplet architecture to graphics with the RDNA 3 architecture, released in 2022.[8]

Academic works edit

  • Wang, Alice; Naffziger, Samuel, eds. (2010). Adaptive Techniques for Dynamic Processor Optimization: Theory and Practice (PDF). Cham: Springer. ISBN 978-0-387-76471-9.
  • Singh, Teja; Schaefer, Alex; Rangarajan, Sundar; John, Deepesh; Henrion, Carson; Schreiber, Russell; Rodriguez, Miguel; Kosonocky, Stephen; Naffziger, Samuel; Novak, Amy (2018). "Zen: An Energy-Efficient High-Performance x86 Core". IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits. 53 (1): 102–114.

References edit

  1. ^ "2014 elevated fellow". IEEE Fellows Directory. Archived from the original on December 31, 2014. Retrieved April 12, 2017.
  2. ^ "Sam Naffziger". AMD. Retrieved April 3, 2023.
  3. ^ "AMD Senior VP and Low-Power Guru, Samuel Naffziger, Addresses the Looming Electronics Power Challenge". All About Circuits. Retrieved April 3, 2023.
  4. ^ Kanellos, Michael (January 25, 2002). "Intel's Itanium: Plan B in the works". ZDNet. Retrieved April 3, 2023.
  5. ^ Shankland, Stephen (March 29, 2006). "AMD lures high-ranking Itanium designer". ZDNet. Retrieved April 3, 2023.
  6. ^ Chuang, Tamara (March 3, 2017). "AMD unveils faster, half-price computer chip". The Denver Post. Retrieved April 3, 2023.
  7. ^ Alcorn, Paul; Walton, Jarred (June 23, 2022). "Into the GPU Chiplet Era: An Interview With AMD's Sam Naffziger". Tom's Hardware. Retrieved April 3, 2023.
  8. ^ Brosdahl, Peter (November 22, 2022). "AMD Lead Engineer Sam Naffziger Explains Advantages of RDNA3 Chiplet Design". The FPS Review. Retrieved April 3, 2023.