Wednesday, 14 March 2012 10:45
Qualcomm brings Eric Demers of AMD to fix graphics
Written by Fuad Abazovic
Needs better than DirectX 9.3
Qualcomm acquired AMD’s handheld and multimedia assets back in January of 2009 and with the mobile graphics division it also acquired a lot of engineers that are supposed to continue working on the future Qualcomm graphics.
People who are following AMD / ATI closely know that this division use to be branded as Imageon. We know this group of people as Adreno graphics now and if you look at some Qualcomm roadmaps you can clearly see that the future of Adreno is currently stuck at DirectX 9.3.
Qualcomm spent $65 million to get some decent graphics from AMD, but it didn’t continue to develop it further. This is where Eric Demers, former graphics CTO comes in play. His job is to work with ex-AMD engineers, the people he already knows from ATI and AMD, and make some decent DirectX 11 graphics with and Adreno sticker on top.
Windows 8 will work on DirectX 9.3 but it will work much better on graphics cores that feature DirectX 11 support. Nvidia and PowerVR have much better fighting chance in this market our industry sources believe.
The next generation Adreno with DirectX 11 support will probably take at least a year from now probably even more but this will be the first big job for Eric Demers new VP of engineering at Qualcomm.
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