by Anton Shilov
06/13/2003 | 02:08 AM
Since everything that relates to 3dfx by now have vanished into thin air if it has not been taken by NVIDIA, it is very interesting to know, where are those people, who made their best to make 3dfx the number one graphics company in the past. We managed to find out quite a lot about ex-3dfx executives and what are they doing now these days.
<%BANNER[article]%>Another co-founder of 3dfx, Mr. Ross Smith, now works at Quantum3D as Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development. He co-founded this 3D company together with Gordon Campbell, another 3dfx executive and co-founder who now serves as the Chairman of the Board at Quantum3D. Both Campbell and Ross are very talented and successful people with long-lasting careers at different companies.
Scott Sellers, another co-founder of 3dfx, seems to have retired, since I could not find a mention about him anywhere.
George T. Haber, who was actually the President and CEO of GigaPixel Corporation now also has dozens of things to do. He and sits on the Board of a few selected Companies: Zoran, BOPS, Aristo Technologies and so on.
Stephen Lapinski, who was Senior Vice President, Worldwide Marketing at 3dfx, now serves as Vice President of System Engineering and Strategic Alliances for the Memory Group at AMD. He is responsible for AMD’s strategic alliances and marketing, business development, and memory sub-system development activities, for the embedded and wireless market segments.
A man 3dfx community will never forget is definitely Alex Leupp, who was the President and Chief Executive Officer of 3dfx in late 2000, when the company was sold to NVIDIA. Well, now Mr. Leupp has the same position at Atsana Semiconductor, a company whose main focus is on media processor solutions for wireless media (video, image and audio) applications. Atsana’s media processors enable wireless smart phones and PC /network cameras, to deliver multimedia applications such as multimedia messaging, interactive video communications, video streaming and other future media rich content without sacrificing battery life or performance.
Phil Carmack, who was originally with the 3dfx team during the early years as Vice President of Hardware, where he oversaw all Voodoo products up through the Voodoo3 and came back at 3dfx as VP of R&D with GigaPixel, where he served as Chief Operating Officer and was responsible for redirecting GigaPixel to execute on DirectX 8.0 architecture, now serves as Vice President Business Development at NVIDIA.
PS. What happened to 3dfx technologies for PDA and cell phones? They were almost ready to go in late 2000 since they were originally developed by GigaPixel, so, I wonder if NVIDIA decided to drop them or to implement something additional into them? Who knows, maybe we will see some 3dfx Giga Voodoos in mobile phones and PDAs some day?
PPS. There are dozens of other 3dfx people from PR, Marketing and R&D who now work at NVIDIA, however, in this news-story we only covered some executives.
PPPS. You can find the history of 3dfx at this web-site.