Published in Graphics

RTG falls under AMD again

by on24 October 2017


Inside shake up

There's been a lot of noise about Raja Koduri Senior Vice President and Chief Architect, Radeon Technologies Group at AMD. His job is to run the Radeon Technologies Group and it was confirmed that he is taking a few months off as a  sabbatical. Now Fudzilla has learned about a big shake up inside AMD.

All the key elements of Radeon and the GPU group report to Lisa Su, the CEO. This is hardly a surprise as Lisa is a good listener and can give some good guidance to the graphics team. At this time, people inside believe that Raja is coming back, but there are no any confirmations or assurances. It looks like that decision has yet to be made. Lisa is coordinating all Radeon activities for the time being. All the graphics leads report to Lisa.  

Honestly it is hard to imagine who could take over from Raja running the RTG, the graphics part of AMD. It might as well be someone from the outside but as we said above, right now, the teams are working as if Raja is returning in a few months.

All RTG marketing now reports to the worldwide marketing lead. The guy who use to be a VP of the worldwide market, John Taylor, is now a chief marketing officer. He worked alongside Lisa and helped to make Ryzen and Epyc intovvery sucessful and desirable products. 

Today all the RTG marketing people report to him. 

Vega was not a great success competing with Nvidia but the company still sold every single piece it made. It can thank the cryptocurrency  market for that, as it is still hungry for any supply. Raja’s real big baby is the Navi, the one that comes after Vega, as this would meet the timeline where Raja took over the graphics development and started the RTG. Raja took over the graphics lead from ex ATI Matt Skynner who was running the ship until late 2015. So, in a way, Vega was Matt's lead product not Raja's but again, Fudzilla strongly believes that parts of RTG oversold the HBM 2 and the overall performance of Vega.  

Raja is a passionate engineer and not afraid to take necessary risks and bear in mind that Nvidia is one very tough competitor. Historically, Nvidia managed to make a slightly better GPU almost every cycle, at least in the last decade.  

Still, RTG has paved the road to the future as after not greatly successful Vega comes Navi which is supposed to give AMD a much needed boost. It simply takes time to make some big changes and despite all events, we think that RTG is on the right path.

RTG will mainly stay the same, but its big brother AMD will get to say and decide the moves, RTG at the end lost some of its autonomy, a small penalty to pay for its misfires. Bear  in mind that the autor has been following ATI / AMD, Intel, Nvidia and a few others since late February 2000 on a daily base. 

Last modified on 24 October 2017
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