Top chip designer jumps Newisys ship

MY IMPECCABLE sauce tells me that the lead chip designer at Newisys, the firm with a spookily Egyptian name which got bought by Sanmina a few weeks back, has decided to graze in pastures Nu. Nvidia pastures, we understand.

David Glasgow recently left Newisys, which when it was formed had as part of its cunning plan a semiconductor which would let Opteron processors scale up and talk to each other a little bit more.

Said sauce tells me that this is a blow to the hopes of the staff left at the firm when Sanmina took it over.

There's a bi-polar atmosphere left in the Newisys rump and the voudon word "tsumba" occurs regularly in conversations with the staff that are left.

The sauce told me: "The acquisition has sucked the energy out of the folks here. We felt we were working on really good stuff and that the Opteron would lead us to the promised land. But now people are walking round looking like monks in a cloister, despite the torrid weather".

Still. There's hope. If Nu Isis now part of Sanmina sells around half a million Opteron units in the next 18 months, share options will resemble cloth of gold rather than pieces of historically interesting paper.

Suits at Sanmina really really hope that AMD will set the world on fire with its AMD64 microprocessors.

But Glasgow waving goodbye indicates that he maybe doesn't see much future there now, although he'll be snapped up by wiser counsels. µ