Over the last year, AMD executives have been abandoning ship for rival Nvidia, and according to a new lawsuit, they took confidential information about the Xbox 720 and PlayStation 4 with them.
Engadget reports that AMD has filed suit against four ex-employees, claiming that the executives absconded with thousands of confidential documents, including sensitive information about technologies at use in next-gen consoles. As our well-placed sources told us last year, custom silicon
based on AMD's A8-series APU and HD 7670 GPU will be used in the PlayStation 4, while the Xbox 720 will combine an
IBM PowerPC CPU and a custom version of AMD's 6670 GPU.
The lawsuit targets the former VP of AMD's Strategic Division, Robert Feldstein, who played a key role in developing custom hardware for game consoles like the Xbox 360, Wii, and Wii U. AMD claims that he and others transfered 100,000 files that contain trade secrets related to development, based on "forensically-recovered data" that indicates the executive used external storage devices on his company computer before his departure. What's more, Feldstein and Richard Hagen, another AMD executive, lured two other employees to Nvidia.
With Nvidia seemingly edged out of the upcoming console generation, Feldstein could be the key to regaining a role in future console hardware. Whether or not he has or will use proprietary data stolen from AMD to help achieve that goal remains to be seen.
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