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 which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

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 Low-power electronics are electronics, such as notebook processors, that have been designed to use less electric power than usual, often at some expense. In the case of notebook processors, this expense is processing power; notebook processors us ...

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

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While it initially manufactur ...

Education

Naffziger received a

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

degree in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology and a

Master of Science A Master of Science ( la, Magisterii Scientiae; abbreviated MS, M.S., MSc, M.Sc., SM, S.M., ScM or Sc.M.) is a master's degree in the field of science awarded by universities in many countries or a person holding such a degree. In contrast to ...

in computer engineering from

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

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 headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...

before moving to

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

in 2002. 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.

2006-present: Advanced Micro Devices

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

Epyc 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 markets. Epyc processors share t ...

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 architecture, released in 2022.

Academic works

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References

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