RobertFeldstein
Latest
AMD accuses former staff of giving 100,000 secret documents to NVIDIA
AMD is suing four ex-employees for allegedly taking thousands of confidential documents with them when they left the company and went to work for NVIDIA. A complaint filed to the District Court of Massachusetts reveals that AMD's former VP of Strategic Development Robert Feldstein, who was instrumental in designing graphics chips for early Xbox 360 consoles and the Wii, is among the defendants. He's accused of playing a role in the electronic transfer of over 100,000 files containing "trade secret materials relating to developing technology." AMD claims it has "forensically-recovered data" to show that external storage devices were used in the days prior to Feldstein's departure, and also that he and another senior exec, Richard Hagen, actively recruited the two other defendants to join them at NVIDIA, in violation of agreements they had signed. Of course, this is just AMD's side of the story. The company told us in a statement that it intends to "aggressively protect" its trade secrets through this litigation, so the rest will just have to play out in court.
AMD exec behind Wii and Xbox 360 graphics jumps the fence to NVIDIA
AMD has been suffering a conspicuous brain drain, with executives like ATI veteran Rick Bergman and CTO Eric Demers crossing over to tangentially or directly competitive companies like NVIDIA and Qualcomm. Chalk up another one for the list -- strategic development VP Bob Feldstein has bounded towards NVIDIA's (literally) greener pastures. The blow cuts deeper than usual through Feldstein's responsibility for graphics in most of the consoles from the past few years: he headed up work behind the Xenos chip in earlier Xbox 360s and the Hollywood core in the Wii, and he likely had some say in the Wii U's video hardware as well. While the staff shuffle won't directly affect AMD's Fusion processors or Radeon cards, it's hard to see much of a positive for AMD's future in video gaming, even in the light of rumors that the next PlayStation and Xbox might use some of Feldstein's work.
