AMD Pushing the AMD+AMD Strategy with Executive Promotions
by Ian Cutress on January 25, 2019 9:00 AM EST
Today AMD is announcing some realignment of its executive team along with some promotions. The idea behind the changes boils down to AMD wanting to focus its efforts on bringing the CPU and GPU strategy together, for future AMD+AMD combinations. The goal is that users should want to pair Ryzen with Radeon, or EPYC with Instinct, and by aligning the hierarchy behind that goal, it should be easier to manage and achieve.
There are several big announcements in AMD’s team today:
Darren Grasby, the long standing SVP of Global Computing and Graphics Sales will now become SVP and Chief Sales Officer, covering both consumer and enterprise, as well as becoming the President of AMD EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa). Darren has been at AMD over twelve years, and has been instrumental in the last couple of years for driving the adoption of Ryzen and Radeon as well as the sales message behind the product portfolio. His remit now covers all of AMD’s enterprise products, as well as the embedded products.
Dr. Sandeep Chennakeshu has been hired from his role as President of Blackberry Technology Solutions to become Executive Vice President of the Computing and Graphics group. Under this role he will manage the strategy, business, and engineering for AMD’s PC, graphics, and semi-custom product lines. Dr. Chennakeshu’s history includes time at Freescale (while Dr. Lisa Su was there), as well as President at Ericsson Mobile Platforms and CTO of Sony Ericsson.
Mark Papermaster, current SVP and CTO of AMD, is promoted to Executive Vice President. This is in recognition of his expanding role within AMD.
Forrest Norrod, SVP and GM of AMD’s Datacenter and Embedded Solutions Group, will now be in control of and have responsibility for both the EPYC and Radeon Instinct product lines.
The idea here is that AMD is going to push prioritize a synergy between Ryzen + Radeon or EPYC + Instinct across the company, leveraging on the success of partnering both sets of products together. In order to do this, it requires upper management to know what both sides are thinking, which is why we are seeing key employees now taking strategy and business roles covering both CPU and GPU product lines.
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Despoiler - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
This confirms that RTG was in fact not being setup to sell.plopke - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
So what does David Wang do now? Wasn't he in charge of graphics?zodiacfml - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
Simple. Bundle them. Provid reviewers with the bundles showing significant price/performance vs. the Nvidia/Intel combo.ManuelDiego - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
Usually, EMEA stands for Europe, Middle East, Africa (same time zones). So the job description of Darren Grasby is probably wrong, i'm guessing.Kevin G - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
Chennakeshu is the interesting one as that could mean that AMD wants to enter the ultra mobile market given his resume. The graphics side of things appears to be competitive enough to scale down in terms of power consumption but the CPU side of things would have to compete not with Intel but rather ARM. I wonder what is brewing on the semi-custom side of thing.Spoelie - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
Skeptical of this move - seems more marketing than anything else. AMD should focus on making the best product it can; regardless of what it is paired with.Imagine a world where they would handicap performance or certain features unless it is paired with another AMD product.
Better would be if additional features were developed, but if they are proprietary and truly innovative & beneficial, it would eventually be copied by Intel/NVIDIA and we have even more instances of competing/incompatible standards. Just at a time where it seems we can finally lay the freesync vs gsync to rest.
Opencg - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
i agree. at first glance this looks bad. nobody in this market is going to be happy about this. even if they have the best intentions for increasing performance and value to the consumer, can they deal with looking so greedy along the way. too bad. i was just starting to really be an amd fanboy. oh well.Targon - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
Remember Centrino? This is more marketing and sales than it is about changing functionality. There will be some interesting things that will happen in the next few years if AMD goes with Gen-Z support on the motherboard. Picture a Ryzen based machine with a discrete graphics card that could also use additional video memory that is installed on the motherboard. Since Intel and NVIDIA both decided to go with their own solutions rather than supporting Gen-Z, AMD CPU+GPU with Gen-Z might provide some very interesting performance benefits. Trying to convince OEMs to actually pay attention to AMD configurations doesn't hurt either, since you really don't see nearly as many AMD based laptops and desktop machines out there in the market compared to Intel, so a renewed focus on marketing to OEMs SHOULD be seen as a good thing.HStewart - Monday, January 28, 2019 - link
I see NVidia and Intel having no reason to join the Gen-Z consortium. It does not provide them any benefits. The primary reason for why we don't see AMD based laptops and desktops is demand. Yes there are some diehard gamers that like AMD but primary for CPU and is Intel and if you need high performance GPU it always NVidia. Even Intel will find it hard to complete with NVidia for higher end GPU.But the biggest limiting factor is that most people don't need high end GPU or more than 2 CPU's. Serious how strong CPU/GPU do you need for word processing or spreadsheets - this is why ARM has been successful in tablet area.
HStewart - Monday, January 28, 2019 - link
I be honest, until today I never seen Gen-Z in computers sounds more like Zen-Z I did look up a non AMD reference to it .https://genzconsortium.org/