Wednesday, September 13th 2017
Raja Koduri On a Sabbatical from RTG till December, AMD CEO Takes Over
Raja Koduri, chief of AMD's Radeon Technologies Group (RTG), has reportedly taken an extended leave from the company, running up to December 2017. Ryan Shrout, editor of PC Perspective stated that he got confirmation from the company about this development. Company CEO Lisa Su has taken direct control over RTG in the meantime.
Formed in 2015 after a major internal reorganization, RTG handles a bulk of AMD's graphics IP, developing and marketing products under the Radeon brand, including Radeon RX series consumer graphics chips, Radeon Pro series professional graphics chips, and Radeon Instinct line of GPGPU accelerators. This move is of particular significance as Q4 tends to be the biggest revenue quarter, as sales rally on account of Holiday.
Raja wrote the following letter to his team
"RTG Team,
You haven't heard from me collectively in a while - a symptom not only of the whirlwind of launching Vega, but simply of the huge number of demands on my time since the formation of RTG. Looking back over this short period, it is an impressive view. We have delivered 6 straight quarters of double-digit growth in graphics, culminating in the launch of Vega and being back in high-performance. What we have done with Vega is unparalleled. We entered the high-end gaming, professional workstation and machine intelligence markets with Vega in a very short period of time. The demand for Vega (and Polaris!) is fantastic, and overall momentum for our graphics is strong.
Incredibly, we as AMD also managed to spectacularly re-enter the high-performance CPU segments this year. We are all exceptionally proud of Ryzen, Epyc and Threadripper. The computing world is not the same anymore and the whole world is cheering for AMD. Congratulations and thanks to those of you in RTG who helped see these products through. The market for high-performance computing is on an explosive growth trajectory driven by machine intelligence, visual cloud, blockchain and other exciting new workloads. Our vision of immersive and instinctive computing is within grasp. As we enter 2018, I will be shifting my focus more toward architecting and realizing this vision and rebalancing my operational responsibilities.
At the beginning of the year I warned that Vega would be hard. At the time, some folks didn't believe me. Now many of you understand what I said. Vega was indeed hard on many, and my sincere heartfelt thanks to all of you who endured the Vega journey with me. Vega was personally hard on me as well and I used up a lot of family credits during this journey. I have decided to take a time-off in Q4 to spend time with my family. I have been contemplating this for a while now and there was never a good time to do this. Lisa and I agreed that Q4 is better than 2018, before the next wave of product excitement. Lisa will be acting as the leader of RTG during by absence. My sincere thanks to Lisa and rest of AET for supporting me in this decision and agreeing to take on additional workload during my absence.
I am looking to start my time-off on Sept 25th and return in December.
Thank you, all of you, for your unwavering focus, dedication and support over these past months, and for helping us to build something incredible. We are not done yet, and keep the momentum going!
Regards, Raja"
Source:
Ryan Shrout (Twitter)
Formed in 2015 after a major internal reorganization, RTG handles a bulk of AMD's graphics IP, developing and marketing products under the Radeon brand, including Radeon RX series consumer graphics chips, Radeon Pro series professional graphics chips, and Radeon Instinct line of GPGPU accelerators. This move is of particular significance as Q4 tends to be the biggest revenue quarter, as sales rally on account of Holiday.
"RTG Team,
You haven't heard from me collectively in a while - a symptom not only of the whirlwind of launching Vega, but simply of the huge number of demands on my time since the formation of RTG. Looking back over this short period, it is an impressive view. We have delivered 6 straight quarters of double-digit growth in graphics, culminating in the launch of Vega and being back in high-performance. What we have done with Vega is unparalleled. We entered the high-end gaming, professional workstation and machine intelligence markets with Vega in a very short period of time. The demand for Vega (and Polaris!) is fantastic, and overall momentum for our graphics is strong.
Incredibly, we as AMD also managed to spectacularly re-enter the high-performance CPU segments this year. We are all exceptionally proud of Ryzen, Epyc and Threadripper. The computing world is not the same anymore and the whole world is cheering for AMD. Congratulations and thanks to those of you in RTG who helped see these products through. The market for high-performance computing is on an explosive growth trajectory driven by machine intelligence, visual cloud, blockchain and other exciting new workloads. Our vision of immersive and instinctive computing is within grasp. As we enter 2018, I will be shifting my focus more toward architecting and realizing this vision and rebalancing my operational responsibilities.
At the beginning of the year I warned that Vega would be hard. At the time, some folks didn't believe me. Now many of you understand what I said. Vega was indeed hard on many, and my sincere heartfelt thanks to all of you who endured the Vega journey with me. Vega was personally hard on me as well and I used up a lot of family credits during this journey. I have decided to take a time-off in Q4 to spend time with my family. I have been contemplating this for a while now and there was never a good time to do this. Lisa and I agreed that Q4 is better than 2018, before the next wave of product excitement. Lisa will be acting as the leader of RTG during by absence. My sincere thanks to Lisa and rest of AET for supporting me in this decision and agreeing to take on additional workload during my absence.
I am looking to start my time-off on Sept 25th and return in December.
Thank you, all of you, for your unwavering focus, dedication and support over these past months, and for helping us to build something incredible. We are not done yet, and keep the momentum going!
Regards, Raja"
50 Comments on Raja Koduri On a Sabbatical from RTG till December, AMD CEO Takes Over
That said, you can't really defend Raja's public appearances though, right?
www.anandtech.com/show/6907/the-king-is-back-raja-koduri-leaves-apple-returns-to-amd
Look at that giant picture. Look at that guy leaving Apple, where Anand wound up going. It's just chock full of amusing elements.
Back then, the part that was formerly ATI was the big hope for enthusiasts. Today? Raja has run that in the ground so far that we mostly shrug when someone brings up Polaris or Vega, then a fanboy will change the subject to Ryzen.
I can understand AMD wanting to reign in his tweeting about their products though. Let a marketing team handle that.
Not Someone you really want in your company :)
There will be a job waiting at the $1000 phone company for him
Its weird to call Raja an idiot while in the same breath not using the proper term, losing. I never heard that Raja was a loose fellow. :p
In fact, even Pascal's GP100 is a direct competitor to Vega and that by itself would already have been enough performance wise. Vega really is a couple years too late, seeing as Navi won't be scaling up the performance on one die any further, while Nvidia's Volta does increase single-die performance. AMD actually forced itself to jump on Navi a full gen earlier than Nvidia, and the only reason for doing so, is because they have nowhere else to go. Nvidia on the other hand can push Volta as a single die solution, and THEN still double its potential through the MCM-solutions they have planned. The potential performance gap will then be doubled - a scary thought IMO.
Surely you realize that Vega is ALSO still trailing a full GPU tier behind in terms of gaming performance, right? It's more than 30% behind, so in fact it is last year's high performance of the mid tier SKU.
And about cards being in stock... I have seen the majority of cards perfectly available for the past few months. Inflated price points, yes. But available, in stock, 24/5 deliveries everywhere. Meanwhile the Vega cards are on hold, out of stock, or to be delivered within a week or two weeks - which remains to be seen.
"Nvidia on the other hand can push Volta as a single die solution, and THEN still double its potential through the MCM-solutions they have planned."
Lol, you really have no understanding of this do you? Why in the world would Nvidia continue to make pricey large dies if they could make multiple smaller and cheaper ones? The answer: they can't. AMD is the only CPU manufacturer on the market right now that managed to stitch together multiple higher performance CPUs, something not even Intel can do yet with an R&D budget bigger than the value of the entirety of AMD. Nvidia has even less experience with interconnects then either AMD or Intel and you just suddenly expect them to be able to have the same groundbreaking achievement as AMD did? You are delusional. Nvidia doesn't even have an MCM on their roadmap so your looking at volta and then the next architecture AT LEAST still being single.
This is about as far as Nvidia has gotten
research.nvidia.com/publication/2017-06_MCM-GPU%3A-Multi-Chip-Module-GPUs
of which, Intel has had MCM processors in the past that ultimately failed due to latency between dies. Notice the article's publication date, after Ryzen's launch. This means that Nvidia didn't think MCMs were feasible until after Ryzen. This also means they have zero progress into actually implementing this into their GPUs for real. Ryzen comes out and all of a sudden Nvidia starts talking up MCMs like they are the future. I remember the same thing happening when the original iphone came out and it took others YEARS to catch up.
"Surely you realize that Vega is ALSO still trailing a full GPU tier behind in terms of gaming performance, right? It's more than 30% behind, so in fact it is last year's high performance of the mid tier SKU."
I don't even know what card you are talking about. WIthout even referencing the card or sources you are just talking out of your ass. Vega 56 = 1070 and Vega 64 = 1080. Their performance are on par with each other. I know you can be talking about the 1080 Ti, because it isn't a year old nor is it mid tier. All of this doesn't change the fact that these cards are still the best Nvidia's got right now. If you didn't realize, your own logic can easily be used against you. For example, The R9 390 was the same price as the GTX 970 and yet the 390's GPU was over 2 years old and still had double the RAM.
Look, MCM is nothing new, neither in the CPU space (Intel had done it before and got knocked hard for it), nor the GPU space (3DFX was doing it, among others). Remember Core 2 Quad? Yeah, MCM, kicked AMD's ass. That's not to say that previous to that AMD's processors weren't kicking Intel's ass.
And that is also why it matters that GV100 is already in existence, I'm not even going to spell this out further for you. If you cannot or do not want to see this, what can I say. Do you really think Nvidia is going to accelerate R&D on MCM so they can toss Volta aside for gaming entirely? How is that efficient? These companies are busy with the next best thing, always, and prefer having a new performance bump in the pipeline. That means you suck everything dry until you move on further. Case in point: the 1070ti release, the 9/11GBps updates, the 650ti Boost, 780 and 780ti (hey look, big dies being released in no less than two competitive, volume products) these things happen all the time.
So, I'm delusional and have no understanding (nice, btw), because Nvidia obviously doesn't want to market Titans. Okay, let's move on.
My original comment was about Volta just like yours, except you fail to see how easy it is for Nvidia to cut down a Volta and push it as a gaming GPU. Meanwhile, AMD has NOTHING to cut down, they just have Vega rumors that they are going to feed off for another couple of years, to then release an underwhelming product. You go boy, keep rooting for that.First you say you don't know what card, then you confirm the 1070 and the 1080. If you want to act tough, you need to actually make a point. Try it sometime. What you just did here was quote me and then burn me with my own argument, as if that somehow would ever work out well. My own logic indeed. Thanks for repeating it, I guess? And the 1080ti... that one doesn't even need to come out to play, because Vega cannot remotely touch it. So yes, Vega offers last years' high performance bracket, today, at inflated price points.
Then you go ahead and harp on about the 970 versus a rebranded AMD card like it has any relation to the topic, and even though the 970 was a sales record in gaming GPUs and AMD bleeds market share since forever - most notably when they started rebranding to R9 product lines. Meanwhile, AMD had big, expensive dies versus a super lean, heavily cut down failed GM104 - failed even to the point that the cut down was sloppy and Nvidia had to settle a court case for it. And still, it sold more.
Love makes blind, right?