Tuesday, November 7th 2017
AMD Radeon Boss Raja Koduri Jumps Ship
As we reported back in September, Raja Koduri took a sabbatical leave from AMD's Radeon Technologies Group (RTG) to find himself. AMD CEO Lisa Su was left in charge during this time as Raja wasn't expected to return until December. However, our friends over at Hexus got their hands on a memo that Raja left to this team revealing his intentions to leave the company for good.
The memo is as follows:
'To my AMD family,
Forty is a significant number in history. It is a number representing transition, testing and change. I have just spent forty days away from the office going through such a transition. It was an important time with my family, and it also offered me a rare space for reflection. During this time I have come to the extremely difficult conclusion that it is time for me to leave RTG and AMD.
I have no question in my mind that RTG, and AMD, are marching firmly in the right direction as high-performance computing becomes ever-more-important in every aspect of our lives. I believe wholeheartedly in what we are doing with Vega, Navi and beyond, and I am incredibly proud of how far we have come and where we are going. The whole industry has stood up and taken notice of what we are doing. As I think about how computing will evolve, I feel more and more that I want to pursue my passion beyond hardware and explore driving broader solutions.
I want to thank Lisa and the AET for enabling me to pursue my passion during the last four years at AMD, and especially the last two years with RTG. Lisa has my utmost respect for exhibiting the courage to enable me with RTG, for believing in me and for going out of her way to support me. I would also like to call out Mark Papermaster who brought me into AMD, for his huge passion for technology and for his relentless support through many difficult phases. And of course, I want to thank each and every one of my direct staff and my indirect staff who have worked so hard with me to build what we have now got. I am very proud of the strong leaders we have and I'm fully confident that they can execute on the compelling roadmap ahead.
I will continue to be an ardent fan and user of AMD technologies for both personal and professional use.
As I mentioned, leaving AMD and RTG has been an extremely difficult decision for me. But I felt it is the right one for me personally at this point. Time will tell. I will be following with great interest the progress you will make over the next several years.
On a final note, I have asked a lot of you in the last two years. You've always delivered. You've made me successful both personally and professionally, for which I thank you all from the bottom of my heart. I have these final requests from you as I leave:
Raja
Lisa Su will continue to lead RTG until a suitable replacement for Raja is found.
Source:
Hexus
'To my AMD family,
Forty is a significant number in history. It is a number representing transition, testing and change. I have just spent forty days away from the office going through such a transition. It was an important time with my family, and it also offered me a rare space for reflection. During this time I have come to the extremely difficult conclusion that it is time for me to leave RTG and AMD.
I have no question in my mind that RTG, and AMD, are marching firmly in the right direction as high-performance computing becomes ever-more-important in every aspect of our lives. I believe wholeheartedly in what we are doing with Vega, Navi and beyond, and I am incredibly proud of how far we have come and where we are going. The whole industry has stood up and taken notice of what we are doing. As I think about how computing will evolve, I feel more and more that I want to pursue my passion beyond hardware and explore driving broader solutions.
I want to thank Lisa and the AET for enabling me to pursue my passion during the last four years at AMD, and especially the last two years with RTG. Lisa has my utmost respect for exhibiting the courage to enable me with RTG, for believing in me and for going out of her way to support me. I would also like to call out Mark Papermaster who brought me into AMD, for his huge passion for technology and for his relentless support through many difficult phases. And of course, I want to thank each and every one of my direct staff and my indirect staff who have worked so hard with me to build what we have now got. I am very proud of the strong leaders we have and I'm fully confident that they can execute on the compelling roadmap ahead.
I will continue to be an ardent fan and user of AMD technologies for both personal and professional use.
As I mentioned, leaving AMD and RTG has been an extremely difficult decision for me. But I felt it is the right one for me personally at this point. Time will tell. I will be following with great interest the progress you will make over the next several years.
On a final note, I have asked a lot of you in the last two years. You've always delivered. You've made me successful both personally and professionally, for which I thank you all from the bottom of my heart. I have these final requests from you as I leave:
- Stay focused on the roadmap!
- Deliver on your commitments!
- Continue the culture of Passion, Persistence and Play!
- Make AMD proud!
- Make me proud!
Raja
Lisa Su will continue to lead RTG until a suitable replacement for Raja is found.
78 Comments on AMD Radeon Boss Raja Koduri Jumps Ship
Ryzen is great, AMD has a win, Radeon needs one bad, BAD.
I dislike NVidia for a lot of reasons but their products are just... well.. good and the drivers are as well. Until recently I never had any current experience with AMD Radeon drivers but holy shit my brother just got a RX560 and I pity him. So many problems, big and small, going straight from an Nvidia to an AMD GPU having it be so fresh in his mind, it's bad..
If Radeon has to follow in Nvidia's footsteps a little in order to keep up then I say go ahead, scrap what Raja was planning and start over, it worked for Ryzen time to do it for their GPUs
Oh and as far as I am concerned if software if functional and has a decent layout then it doesn't matter how it looks. ricer.. Fix the drivers first...
[LEFT]At substantially higher cost. Vega wasn't intended to be the Fury X of this generation.[/LEFT]
Also seems like he's joining Intel; basically what should've happened in the first place: Intel buying ATI and AMD joining forces with Nvidia. That would've been one hell of a battle.
(Air quotes) :p
Lisa took over the reigns, cracked the whip and pointed the ship. Now, she brings someone in to lead dollowing the star she put in the sky. Raja heads off to Intel for AI. :p
My hope that whomever replaces Raja returns focus to DirectX and Vulkan.
And saying NVIDIA has excellent drivers... if you'd only know what kind of bullshit problems I'm going through with NVIDIA for months now... And all connected to monumentally fucked up V-Sync logic. Horrible image tearing and corruption all over the place for videos in various V-Sync states. Something I never experienced on any Radeon for years. I mean, how can one fuck up V-Sync? Like, seriously? And yeah, NVIDIA Control Panel is garbage. It's buggy as hell, horrendously slow, loaded with dumb glitches all over the place and all this has existed for years. Just shows the QA levels at NVIDIA and how much their users give a F about quality and experience. I'd be furious to pay 800€ for a graphic card which is then controlled with such utter garbage UI. Which explains why I'm furious about it right here. When you have the fastest graphic card in the world and you still go and check RX Vega offerings (twice!), one might ask the question what's wrong with it... Yeah, it's ridiculously fast. When it works. When it doesn't (and that seems to be happening a lot), it's the biggest dumpster fire I've seen in last decade. At least their tech support does respond in a timely fashion and they aren't complete idiots like I'm used with most tech supports.
I am not here to argue with you but once again you are the eternal optimist when it comes to AMD and your speculations are useless (not a personal insult just that speculation is useless) like many of your other posts about Vega/Polaris before they came out. I am a realist so I don't expect anything but more of the same until the product comes out and the real specifics are reported.
As for your driver issues all I can do is take your word for it since I have not had those issues but I hope you get them resolved.
Try not to be so dramatic, state facts/specifics and move on. In your second paragraph it sounds like you have a vendetta against your GPU.
I think Navi will be a dud. Will probably have new features and some ground breaking tech to it (like HBM), but at the end of the day have crap fps.
Raja will worm his way in to Intel working for the Intel/RTG cpu team.
It will be hard, even impossible for AMD to recover on GPU front.
Yeah, that Nvidia control panel sure is garbage though. Truly pathetic. And the Geforce Experience app is just aweful in so many ways....
On the front of graphics they failed miserably. You think Crimson driver is good? Overwatch is broken for what, 6 months now? Go to reddit. Tons of issues with even basic AMD tech like FreeSync. I would take Nvidia 's "boring" but functional driver over this Crimson neon flashy poop any time.
On the front of computing they can't touch nvidia. Hardware wise they can not compete. Software wise they don't even provide proper OpenCL tech support.
Raja promised more than what he can deliver. If he just focused on graphics it might end up better.
Good riddance.
Frankly, I find it odd that anyone is trying to pin blame on him for AMD's current GPU products... because it is not directly his fault. He's just the figurehead. He simply isn't able to get what he wants out of his career at AMD now, so it's time to move on, and that might be due to restrictions placed on his ideas by AMD, and not anything he's actually done.
Would be great to interview him. I do ghave a feeling though that most of the questions I would have for him would be confined to NDAs. :pYeah, because he writes all the drivers himself, and designs all the GPUs... the rest of the staff at RTG does absolutely nothing at all, and because of that high workload, he is leaving. Like what in the heck are you saying? I'm sorry, but... I can't help but say something here.
He'll leave, and nothing will change, and then you all will blame someone else. This whole thing and the way you guys respond to things like this... and everything when it comes to news and such in this industry.. is why I can't wait until my replacement is ready to take over. Can lead a horse to water, but can't make him drink, so fuck it.