Raja Koduri, AMD's Radeon Tech Group Leader, Resigns (anandtech.com) 38
Ryan Smith, writing for AnandTech: On the day following what's perhaps one of the greatest (and oddest) product design wins for AMD's Radeon Technologies Group, a second bit of surprising news is coming out of AMD. Raja Koduri, the Senior VP and Chief Architect of the group, who has been its leader since the RTG was formed two years ago, has announced that he is resigning from the company, effective tomorrow. Word of Raja's resignation originally broke via an internal memo penned by Raja and acquired by Hexus. And while AMD will not confirm the validity of the memo, the company is confirming that Raja has decided to leave the company.
oh dear. (Score:1)
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Re:oh dear. (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem here is AMD is #winning in the CPU arena, while Raja was #losing as the head of RTG (their GPU side).
Raja's double failure of Polaris and Vega GPU architectures got him shit canned. He wasn't even present for the launch of Vega, his headline project. Lisa Su suspended him immediately after he returned from that vacation. They called it a 3 month sabbatical. 40 days in and he's officially fired. It's just that his position was high up enough that they're framing it as an amicable break and he was given time to find another job before the shit hit the fan.
Have you ever heard the phrase "to seek new opportunities"? What do you think it actually means?
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It means the relationship soured, and that both parties are better off heading in their own separate directions. It means that the wife wanted to be a cop, but the husband couldn't handle chewing his white knuckles every time his wife came home from work half an hour late.
Is the wife wrong? Is the husband wrong? How about we all consult the Magic Eight Ball of foregone conclusions?
God gave us a jumbo helping o
Re: oh dear. (Score:2)
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Re: oh dear. (Score:2)
Something to do with the Intel deal? (Score:1)
Seems like the two announcements came back to back.
AMD needs to keep up in the cpu market intel sucsk (Score:2)
AMD needs to keep up in the cpu market intel sucks with low pci-e / raid keys / slow DMI bus (at least some server boards link in more PCI-E from the CPU to boost PHC io)
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Overclocking/overvolting will do it. Although, they do have built-in thermal protections to help.
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There are two different sorts of overclocking and overvolting these days. There are the ones that the manufacturers support, so that tinkerers can safely simulated-tinker in a safe little walled garden. And there are the ones that are entirely out of the manufacturers specs. If you go outside of the manufacturers specs, once you break the chip you have only yourself to blame.
Interesting article (Score:4, Interesting)
Here is [hardocp.com] an interesting article on what Raja was doing with RTG by HardOCP's Kyle Bennet (even talked about Intel interest in the AMD graphics). Kyle did also predict that Raja would not return when he went into Sabbatical a couple of months ago. The article is from a year and a half ago, so it is not about the current status: Kyle has since written that AMD seems to be on a good track with the internal shuffling and in its best form in years.
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I'm willing to bet that AMD check-mated him by doing that intel contract to support GPU's to their chips. Why would intel want to hire him, when they can license out what the whole team can do.
Add that to the fact that his big GPU's projects fell short. So I think this is a way to get him to leave without egg all over his face and poaching people.
I think it's brilliant on AMD's part!
Internal struggle (Score:2)
I can't find the article now, I believe it was some Seeking Alpha investment nonsense, but I remember reading something in the last couple years about how he was very unhappy at Radeon and there were major flaws with Vega that needed to be smoothed over (heat generation in particular); once Vega was launched he would probably leave due to internal politics.
It seems like it might be a FUD piece but I've been wondering what would happen to him after Vega and now I guess we know.
I can't say this bothers me (Score:2)
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The situation for them on Linux is still a lot more hit-and-miss than that. Even Intel and Nvidia have managed comparatively broad compatibility and stability on Linux by now. AMD has made great strides in closing the performance gap on Linux lately, but for commercial game compatibility they still have a long way to go.
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