Samuel Naffziger is an American

electrical engineer Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

who has been employed at

Advanced Micro Devices Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a Information technology, hardware and F ...

in Fort Collins, Colorado since 2006. He was named a

Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers , the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and ot ...

(IEEE) in 2014 for his leadership in the development of

power management Power management is a feature of some electrical appliances, especially copiers, computers, computer CPUs, computer GPUs and computer peripherals such as monitors and printers, that turns off the power or switches the system to a low-power ...

and

low-power processor Low-power electronics are electronics designed to consume less electric power, electrical power than usual, often at some expense. For example, notebook processors usually consume less power than their Desktop computer, desktop counterparts, at ...

technologies. He is also the Senior Vice President and Product Technology Architect at

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a hardware and fabless company that de ...

Education

Naffziger received a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, B.S., B.Sc., SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree that is awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Scienc ...

degree in electrical engineering from the

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private research university in Pasadena, California, United States. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small group of institutes ...

and a

Master of Science A Master of Science (; abbreviated MS, M.S., MSc, M.Sc., SM, S.M., ScM or Sc.M.) is a master's degree. In contrast to the Master of Arts degree, the Master of Science degree is typically granted for studies in sciences, engineering and medici ...

in computer engineering from

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

Career

Early career

For eight years, Naffziger led the Itanium design team at

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California ...

before moving to

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

in 2002. At Intel, Naffziger played a leading role in the introduction of two major

Itanium Itanium (; ) is a discontinued family of 64-bit computing, 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). The Itanium architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was later jointly dev ...

models at the International Solid State Circuits Conference, the

McKinley McKinley may refer to: People *McKinley (name), a page for people with the surname and given name "McKinley" **William McKinley, 25th president of the United States. Places Philippines * Fort William McKinley (now Fort Bonifacio) in Metro Ma ...

processor in 2002 and Montecito in 2005.

2006-present: Advanced Micro Devices

Naffziger was an architect lead on AMD's

Ryzen Ryzen ( ) is a brand of multi-core x86-64 microprocessors, designed and marketed by AMD for desktop, mobile, server, and embedded platforms, based on the Zen microarchitecture. It consists of central processing units (CPUs) marketed for mai ...

processors that launched in March 2017. He was the lead advocate for AMD's Ryzen and

Epyc Epyc (stylized as EPYC) is a brand of multi-core x86-64 microprocessors designed and sold by AMD, based on the company's Zen microarchitecture. Introduced in June 2017, they are specifically targeted for the server and embedded system market ...

lines to move to a modular, chiplet-based approach. Towards the end of 2017, Naffziger began to lead the AMD graphics team in bringing a chiplet architecture to graphics with the

RDNA 3 RDNA 3 is a GPU microarchitecture designed by AMD, released with the Radeon RX 7000 series on December 13, 2022. Alongside powering the RX 7000 series, RDNA 3 is also featured in the SoCs designed by AMD for the Asus ROG Ally, Lenovo Legion ...

architecture, released in 2022.

Academic works

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References

Fellows of the IEEE Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Place of birth missing (living people) American electrical engineers {{US-electrical-engineer-stub