Ex-Hardware.fr GPU Editor Damien Triolet Jumps Ship from AMD RTG to Intel

[VSG]

Oh hey remember this news post from July last year? Damien Triolet's work history off-late has been one of many such recent stories. These tend to begin with AMD, and RTG in particular, getting a cash infusion and growing in 2016 and 2017 to where they hired some of the best engineers and marketing personnel from the industry- media or otherwise. This follows a more stagnant GPU division in 2017-2018, Intel deciding to dip their toes back into the discrete GPU market, and in turn.. persuading many to cross over to the blue side.

According to Damien's LinkedIn and FaceBook profiles, he has started working for Intel from November 26, 2018 in a technical marketing position in their Gaming and Graphics division, a role analogous to his from his days at AMD. Presumably, he joins Raja Koduri and the many others who have followed this exact path of late, and everyone remains curious as to what the finished retail product will be. In the meantime, we here at TechPowerUp wish him the best again for his new venture. We had the pleasure of interacting with Damien on multiple occasions in the past, some as colleagues in the media giving hardware manufacturers a hard time, and others when he was hosting us as an AMD employee. His tenure at Hardware.fr has been inspiring to us, with excellent reviews that no doubt were what caught the eyes of AMD in the first place, and Intel will definitely gain from his presence.



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[TheGuruStud]

Yes, yes, purge the losers. Intel can have em all.

 

[TristanX]

Intel moneys are disruptive for AMD

 

[TheGuruStud]

Intel moneys are disruptive for AMD

It's just more money they'll lose. Intel has yet to create anything new in 15+ yrs and have thrown many billions at it trying. And the management seems to be getting more incompetent.

 

[ArbitraryAffection]

Intel Technical Marketing for gaming... Oh joy.

So his job is to lie that intel products are 50% faster for them l33t hardcore Gamerz. huh.

 

[_Flare]

I don´t think Damien will go nutz at Intel.
The guy i think he is, will do benchmarks and/or check that the numbers we will see, stand on solid data.

Intel better doesn´t repeat the benchmark disaster with "Principled Technologies".
He is a very respected guy for some reasons.

btw. anything a company is showing with numbers or compairisons is kind of technical marketing

 

[Imsochobo]

what I've noticed is apart from raja there is no technical people jumping ship that we hear about.

Marketing isn't really what I feel was RTG's strong point at any time.

 

[xkm1948]

Why all the hate? Any tech talent would prefer a better paid job.

AMD should have never purchased ATi in the first place as it was doom for the creation spirit from both company. Glad to see AMD returning to its CPU roots and glad to see former ATi backbones getting new opportunity at Intel.

Now we just need David Wang joining Intel to make it perfect.

 

[Mysteoa]

Why all the hate? Any tech talent would prefer a better paid job.

AMD should have never purchased ATi in the first place as it was doom for the creation spirit from both company. Glad to see AMD returning to its CPU roots and glad to see former ATi backbones getting new opportunity at Intel.

Now we just need David Wang joining Intel to make it perfect.

Without ATi, AMD would not have the money to make Zen. GPU were keeping them afloat.

 

[Dave65]

Without ATi, AMD would not have the money to make Zen. GPU were keeping them afloat.

This!

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

Without ATi, AMD would not have the money to make Zen. GPU were keeping them afloat.

Devil's advocate: ATi's development of Terrascale, evergreen and GCN consumed massive amounts of resources, a drain AMD was unable to manage properly. This resulted in phenom II, core 2's actual competitor, to come out after nehalem, and got so bad that AMD massively cheaped out on the R+D of CPUs, culminating in the glorious bulldozer, a chip with worse IPC then its predecessor that damn near tanked AMD.

The management teams between ATi and AMD never got along, and infighting not only cost resources, it delayed products. AMD's dream of APUs was technically feasable back in 2008-2009, but it took until early 2011 for the first Llanos to come out. This infighting also lead to restricted budgeting for things like ATi's driver team, which gave AMD one hell of a legacy that to this day it is attempting to overcome. This is despite the fact that ATi's GPU development sucked up so many resources that the CPU division withered on the stalk.

Without ATi and AMD hamstringing each other, AMD would have been able to focus on CPUs rather then getting distracted with GPUs. While its APU division never would have existed, the smaller, leaner, more focused company would have been able to keep releases more on track, rather then losing the steam athlon 64 managed to build up.

This!

That!

 

[AsRock]

Why all the hate? Any tech talent would prefer a better paid job.

AMD should have never purchased ATi in the first place as it was doom for the creation spirit from both company. Glad to see AMD returning to its CPU roots and glad to see former ATi backbones getting new opportunity at Intel.

Now we just need David Wang joining Intel to make it perfect.

Maybe they would of been much better of buying but not trying to do two projects at the same time.

How i see it one or the other has saved them over the years and at this time it's the CPU side but the GPU side has helped them a bunch of year before now.

If they hadn't picked up ATI all those years back them both might not be around today, or at least sold to a highest bidder.

 

[renz496]

Without ATi, AMD would not have the money to make Zen. GPU were keeping them afloat.

Rather that outright acquire ATI that end up costing a lot of money there is other option.

 

[sergionography]

Without ATi, AMD would not have the money to make Zen. GPU were keeping them afloat.

Without ATI they would've had an extra 7 billion dollars to invest in R&D
Instead they used up all the cash in hand all while becoming bigger and adding in more expenses. Now I do believe amd merging with ati is good overall, however the right thing to do was to merge with nvidia as they initially wanted. Nvidia agreed only on the condition that the nvidia CEO would become the new merged companies CEO; which would've been excellent because we now can look at history and see how amd was plagued with years after years of terrible CEOs. While jen hsung huang is honestly nothing short of excellent from a CEO standpoint.

 

[xkm1948]

AMD should just keep the semi-custom part of RTG and sell the rest to Intel. Win-Win!

 

[AsRock]

Without ATI they would've had an extra 7 billion dollars to invest in R&D
Instead they used up all the cash in hand all while becoming bigger and adding in more expenses. Now I do believe amd merging with ati is good overall, however the right thing to do was to merge with nvidia as they initially wanted. Nvidia agreed only on the condition that the nvidia CEO would become the new merged companies CEO; which would've been excellent because we now can look at history and see how amd was plagued with years after years of terrible CEOs. While jen hsung huang is honestly nothing short of excellent from a CEO standpoint.

And who''s to say it would of turned out ok ?, your just presuming that 7b would of been enough, maybe it would of been but who really knows ?. Maybe they knew they were going have issue's in the near future.

Like hell Intel had already turned the market against them for the most part, they knew they could not do that with the graphics side of stuff so took a risk.

Sure it''s been ruff on them but they are getting back finally.

 

[eidairaman1]

And who''s to say it would of turned out ok ?, your just presuming that 7b would of been enough, maybe it would of been but who really knows ?. Maybe they knew they were going have issue's in the near future.

Like hell Intel had already turned the market against them for the most part, they knew they could not do that with the graphics side of stuff so took a risk.

Sure it''s been ruff on them but they are getting back finally.

AMD stayed afloat due to consoles, gpus. Their chipsets stemmed from ATi Acquisition.

 

[Space Lynx]

It's just more money they'll lose. Intel has yet to create anything new in 15+ yrs and have thrown many billions at it trying. And the management seems to be getting more incompetent.

Nvidia will always be king in gpu's whether we like it or not. /shrug

 

[Xaled]

Without ATi, AMD would not have the money to make Zen. GPU were keeping them afloat.

AMD desgined Zen before the crypto bandwagon. actualy AMD would'd made Zen 8 years ago if it didnt buy ATI. That money that went to ATIs ex owners shouldve been spent on CPU development not on buying ATI.

 

[XXL_AI]

New type of graphics processing technologies are coming and we won't need high-end TFLOP junky GPUs in the future. All will be done with pretrained datasets, like Nvidia showcased with RTX platform.

 

[HTC]

AMD stayed afloat due to consoles, gpus. Their chipsets stemmed from ATi Acquisition.

In other words, buying ATI saved AMD.

 

[R-T-B]

Without ATi, AMD would not have the money to make Zen. GPU were keeping them afloat.

Without ATI, AMD would've have a metric button more money to compete with Core r&d

In other words, buying ATI saved AMD.

Or nearly completely killed them. But you know, 20/20 hindsight.

 

[HTC]

Without ATI, AMD would've have a metric button more money to compete with Core r&d



Or nearly completely killed them. But you know, 20/20 hindsight.

But without the chipsets / GPUs gained by buying ATI, AMD could possibly have gone under fighting Intel.

 

[Xaled]

But without the chipsets / GPUs gained by buying ATI, AMD could possibly have gone under fighting Intel.

Consoles HURT AMD it didnt save it at all. Stop ignoring the truth. When AMD bought ATI for 5.6 billion dollars! in 2006 it was kicking Intels ass at that time and ATI were also on par with nVidia. Neither AMD nor ATI nor we costumer win a thing from this. The only winners of the acquisition are NVIDIA AND INTEL

 

[R-T-B]

But without the chipsets / GPUs gained by buying ATI, AMD could possibly have gone under fighting Intel.

They immediately spun off GloFo after aquiring ATI IIRC just to help afford it, meaning that would've kept them afloat for some time if cash became an issue.

Best case, they may have done better AND even had more fab options.