AMD : Terry Makedon Interview (US)

PCi : Hi Terry, could you explain to us what is your job at AMD ? How long have you been working on Radeon GPU software stuff ?

T.M. : Thank you David, I am sure our interview will have many interesting insights. Well, I have been with ATI/AMD for 9 years now (almost – I started Feb 21 2001) and I am the Manager of Software Product Management.

This means that my team and I are responsible for the roadmap and delivery of Catalyst drivers (and all other software for ATI Radeon products).

PCi : You're the man behind the CatalystMaker Twitter account.

Was it your idea or did the AMD marketing guys send you a mail with « Can you please create a twitter account ? » as a subject ?

T.M. : Interacting with the end user community is not new for me. I used to spend many hours in forums such as Rage3D or DriverHeaven talking to users. Twitter is just a new way of doing that. It was my idea to see how much interest there is in Catalyst updates on Twitter.

Although I don’t have as many followers as Ashton Kutcher or Britney Spears I do have currently about 4 500 people interested in Catalyst updates (Note if anyone wants to follow I can be found here : http://twitter.com/CatalystMaker)

PCi : What is the game you play the most these days ?

T.M. : The game of fatherhood ;-) I have a 9 months old baby so my gaming has reduced greatly. I recently finished Borderlands and was playing The Saboteur this week-end.

PCi : What is your passion, when you're not @ AMD HQ ?

T.M. : Wow, so many things to list. I am very passionate about life in general. I love to travel and see the world, I love movies, cooking is something I actually enjoy greatly, and going to concerts or nightclubs on the week-ends is always fun.

My greatest passion though is my family, and having them by my side makes my life so much more enjoyable.

PCi : Have you ever bought a GeForce ?

T.M. : Truthfully no. I don’t think I have ever bought any GPU because I have access to them at my job ;-)

Even if I ever stop working at ATI/AMD I don’t think I would ever buy a GeForce though, I just have too much love for ATI.

Catalyst Dev Team

PCi : Can you tell us how many people are dedicated to the Catalyst development, Linux version and GPU Computing (Stream) stuff ?

T.M. : I don’t know exact number to be honest. We have roughly the same number of software engineers as before as we do hardware engineers.

PCi : You're an « ATI guy ». Some years after AMD bought your company, what do you think about this « integration » ? Was it good for you ?

T.M. : For sure. Instead of just being able to work on GPU’s we now have the ability to work on CPU’s and best of all APU’s (Accelerated Processing Unit which means AMD Fusion).

PCi : What is a typical working day @ AMD Software team ?

T.M. : Lots of meetings. A very important task is prioritizing. Every week we look at all the features we have in our roadmap and prioritize them all in order of importance.

At any given time we have hundreds of new features we want to work on. I spend a lot of time outside of the office as well – travelling to meet press or customers.

PCi : What is the typical way to check if the driver is not a buggy one @ AMD ?

T.M. : Our QA department has hundreds machines running tests 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

Both automated testing and manual user testing. We have QA centres in many of our offices including but not limited to Canada, USA and India.

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