Raja Koduri, Head of AMD's RTG, to go on Sabbatical until December
by Nate Oh on September 13, 2017 9:00 AM EST
Late last night, PC Perspective confirmed rumors that Raja Koduri, AMD's Radeon Technologies Group (RTG) Senior Vice President and Chief Architect, is to go on sabbatical. Sourcing Raja’s internal letter to the RTG team, he will be taking leave from September 25 until an unspecified date in December, to spend time with his family. Dr Lisa Su, AMD's CEO, will lead RTG in the interim.
As reproduced by Ryan Shrout, Raja’s letter is as follows:
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
Since his return to AMD in 2013 and the reformation of a monolithic graphics division with RTG in 2015, Raja has overseen and led all aspects of AMD graphics hardware and software. Raja’s public presence and involvement render him the face of graphics at AMD, in all senses of the word, from Capsaicin events to Twitter and Reddit. Following Vega’s launch, Raja had taken two weeks vacation to visit family, following visits to company sites in India.
Given the news in his letter, we hope all is well.
Source: PC Perspective
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Calin - Friday, September 15, 2017 - link
The biggest enemy of current NVidia is NVidia of one-two years ago - if the graphic cards (for example) they make aren't much better than the older ones, fewer people would upgrade. Intel is in the same situation - their current processors aren't so much better (from a typical user point of view) than the ones from a couple of years (or even more) ago, so people postpone upgrades.vladx - Wednesday, September 13, 2017 - link
Not remotely true, unlike CPU manufacturers Gpu manufacturers can't afford to stagnate if they wanna keep selling their products especially with new developments such as mobile, VR and machine learning which would've still pushed Nvidia to innovate even without AMD.xype - Wednesday, September 13, 2017 - link
Yeah, mobile is awesome. Qualcomm is doing amazing work even without competition, their mobile CPUs and GPUs are making huge leaps in performance every year.vladx - Wednesday, September 13, 2017 - link
Mobile means more than smartphones, and there's also the embedded market that I've forgot about.xype - Thursday, September 14, 2017 - link
I know. And those are all making great strides in CPU and GPU performances, you think? How’s Imagination Tech doing these days?vladx - Thursday, September 14, 2017 - link
Well Img Tech is still alive, but we're talking about Nvidia here which is doing great in those areas.Opencg - Thursday, September 14, 2017 - link
Lol. Wrong. Nvidia has proven that they don't stagnate when they are ahead. Tesla would come out on time and every bit as good just slightly more expensive.CPUGPUGURU - Wednesday, September 13, 2017 - link
Over hyped Watt Sucking Vega is a EPIC Gaming Fail, Raja and his team should be sent on permanent leave/fired.Cred Dead AMD said According to AMD's DON WOLIGROSKI, the Radeon RX Vega performance compared to the likes of NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and the Titan Xp, Vega looks really nice."
It seems very likely that RX Vega is going to compete against NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1080 Ti in the flagship enthusiast product department in both price and performance. NONE of these Blatant Lies were even close to what Watt Sucking Vega really was. Also AMD's nefarious disappearing Rebate BS that Falsely made reviewers compare Watt Sucking Vega 56/64 with performance per watt champion Pascal 1070/1080 when in reality because of price Vega 56/64 should be compared to Pascal 1080/1080Ti which DESTROYS Vega. Desperate AMD will do and say anything to fool reviewers and gamers, NOTHING AMD propaganda pumps is to be trusted.
valinor89 - Wednesday, September 13, 2017 - link
I think we are just not getting what Vega is. It was never meant as a gaming GPU. Why? Because there is no margin in selling it as such.Consider this. RTG have been selling the Polaris cards as fast as they could make them, to gamers or miners does not matter here. Yet even selling so much the RTG has not had good financial results. Simply put, selling gaming cards is not reallt that profitable.
Vega is a card made to enter the Compute / Professional market that by serendipity can almost compete on the gaming level.
As it is AMD needs cash, lots of cash, to be able to invest in R&D like nvidia can. When they can afford to create gaming GPU like Nvidia does now we might return to have a competitive AMD lineup for gaming.
vladx - Wednesday, September 13, 2017 - link
Keep telling yourself that, it's not even the first time AMD lied about their product's performance when they knew it wasn't even close to reality.