AMD Files Suit Against Former Employees For Alleged Document Theft 72
New submitter massivepanic writes "AMD has filed (and been granted) a request for immediate injunctive relief against multiple former employees that it alleges stole thousands of confidential documents. Named in the complaint (PDF) are Robert Feldstein, Manoo Desai, Nicholas Kociuk, and Richard Hagen. All four left AMD to work at Nvidia in the past year. The loss of Feldstein was particularly noteworthy, as he'd been the head of AMD's console initiatives for years. Feldstein was behind the work that landed AMD the Wii U, PS4, and Xbox Durango. He also worked closely with Microsoft during the Xbox 360s development cycle and brought that contract to ATI prior to AMD's acquisition."
Forensics: doing it wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
“The court has ordered that the named defendants [...] prepare their computers and storage devices for forensic evaluation, and refrain from taking any action that would obfuscate the location of said devices or the data contained therein.”
Isn’t that a contradiction? That’s like CSI calling you up and telling you “We’re coming over next week, so make sure you prepare the crime scene for our arrival.”
I kinda doubt it here (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing is companies don't usually want to play that sort of game in situations like this because the chance to get sued is too high. They'll often help each other stop it. A dude tried to sell Coke's recipe to Pepsi, Pepsi called the FBI.
Goes double here, since nVidia seems to have the superior technology as of late. AMD's GPUs aren't bad, but they aren't as high performance as nVidia's parts, and their drivers are not as polished. There just isn't any magic juju that nVidia would want to steal, particularly given the risks.
My guess is this isn't an orchestrated defection. My guess is it is one of two things:
1) Some morons figured that they could make it big doing this, stole the documents on their own, and went over to nVidia. Perhaps this is even a result of a tip from nVidia.
2) This is a smokescreen on AMD's part, to try and keep these guys away from nVidia.
I just don't find it likely that nVidia would buy them off to do this. Too much to lose, not enough to gain. While they might want the people, which is totally legal, the tech isn't worth the risk.
Re:I kinda doubt it here (Score:4, Insightful)
Nonsense. AMD's GPUs tend to be high performance parts. Anyone looking at their performance can easily see this.
Nvidia, though, does tend to have better drivers; AMD/ATI, better hardware.
Re:I kinda doubt it here (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know about the high performance cards, but a HD7770 can run circles around the similarily priced GTX650 cards. Same story with HD7750 and GT640.