AMD Taps IBM Chiphead for Board of Directors

Published: November 30, 2009

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Nick Donofrio, who retired last year after spending 44 years as a chip and technology guru at IBM, has been appointed to the board of directors of X64 chip maker Advanced Micro Devices.

Donofrio got his start at Big Blue as a logic and memory chip designer, and has run a number of divisions at the company, including its Unix server businesses when they came to market in 1990 and its mainframe business when it was being revitalized in the early 2000s. Before Donofrio retired last May, he had risen to the position of executive vice president of innovation and technology, which basically translated into combing the universities of the world and making sure that the IBM Research, Systems and Technology Group, and Software Group were kept well-stocked with brainiacs and focused on the kinds of research and development that leads, ultimately, to revenues and profits.

Donofrio got his bachelor's degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), which is north of Albany and now a hotspot of chip and nanotech development that is being funded, in part, by--you guessed it--IBM and AMD. Donofrio is on the board of directors at Bank of New York/Mellon and Liberty Mutual, and also serves on the board of trustees for RPI.

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