Sam Naffziger

Samuel Naffziger is an American electrical engineer who has been employed at Advanced Micro Devices in Fort Collins, Colorado since 2006. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2014 for his leadership in the development of power management and low-power processor technologies. He is also the Senior Vice President and Product Technology Architect at AMD.

Education
Naffziger received a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology and a Master of Science in computer engineering from Stanford University.

Early career
For eight years, Naffziger led the Itanium design team at Hewlett-Packard before moving to Intel in 2002. At Intel, Naffziger played a leading role in the introduction of two major Itanium models at the International Solid State Circuits Conference, the McKinley processor in 2002 and Montecito in 2005.

2006-present: Advanced Micro Devices
Naffziger was an architect lead on AMD's Ryzen processors that launched in March 2017. He was the lead advocate for AMD's Ryzen and Epyc lines to move to a modular, chiplet-based approach. Towards the end of 2017, Naffziger began to lead the AMD graphics team in bringing a chiplet architecture to graphics with the RDNA 3 architecture, released in 2022.

Academic works