ATI's PR musical chairs game stops

"YOU'LL FIND MY sweetheart and me, while we're poisoning pig...." and the music stops. What happened to the PR people of the new DAAMIT, and where are they now? That answer is all over the map.

Much of it centres around Europe and the resultant shuffle when people move. Chris Hook, most recently of ATI Europe was promoted to Senior Manager PR and Performance Communications, or something close to it. That left a void to the northwest of Euro Disney, and it was quickly filled.

Ian 'Hiding in clear plastic bags doesn't work' McNaughon

Jon Carvil mostly filled those shoes as Head of PR EMEAI, and Ian McNaughton filled the other half and got cards that said Head of Product and Platform Marketing EMEAI. Basically, Jon is doing the PR side of things, and Ian platform marketing. They both, separately, went from pre-merger ATI to pre-merger AMD. After DAAMIT became reality, they both went back to the ATI side of things, separately together. Now they are going to Euroland separately together. With me so far?

When you are at the top, where do you go? Well, a few little birds tell us that Chris Evandon, former high muckety-muck of Analyst Relations NV is now at Nvidia, but since birds have notoriously short vocabularies, we are not sure what he is doing. The best we could make out is "Polly want IR" or something.

Far more importantly, we have Zhi 'Many' Chin, warm food guru at the ATI cafeteria. He was poached by the one place that could tempt him the local Chinese restaurant(1). We think this is a good step up for him, and it should allow for several out of territory jobs after a few years of hard work.

Another bird singing told us that Rich Heye, who left ATI shortly after the merger, is now at Sandisk. Actually, that is a lie, we ran into him at CES, and his badge said Sandisk on it, and it looked legit, but it could be a forgery.

Last up, we have a big engineering loss. Ralph Wigglesworth III of the advanced research (R8xx/R9xx) team's janitorial staff has left in a huff. No word as to where he has gone, rumors abound that both Intel and NV are looking for people with ATI research experience, but until we hear directly from our friend, we won't spread rumours. µ

(1) For those of you not in the know, Markham, Ontario is a sleepy suburb of the northern fur trading outpost called Toronto. While much of the larger outpost's income still comes from the fur market, Markham missed out on this lucrative source of income and has had to seek out scraps where it can, like in high tech. There are two restaurants in Markham that do not serve local cuisine (beaver tripe with a side of 'bacon', washed down with a Labatts. Many is going to the one that does not serve Italian food, hence is 'Chinese' according to the locals.