In a move of outstanding wisdom and forward thinking, AMD has made a personnel move that I can get behind and support. After forming the Radeon Technologies Group to help refocus the company on graphics, it has promoted Raja Koduri to the role of Senior Vice President and Chief Architect of that new group. While this might be a little bit of an "inside baseball" announcement to discuss, Raja is one of the few people in the industry that I have known since day one and he is an outstanding and important person in the graphics world as we know it today.
Koduri recently returned to AMD after a stint with Apple as the mobile SoC vendors director of graphics architecture and his return was met with immediate enthusiasm and hope for a company that continues to struggle financially.
In this new role, Koduri will no longer just be responsible for the IP of AMD graphics, adding to his responsibility the entirety of the hardware, software and business direction for Radeon products. From personal experience I can assure readers that Raja is a fantastic leader, has great instincts for what the industry needs and has seen some of AMD's most successful products through development.
This new role and new division of structure at AMD will come with a lot of responsibility, as Koduri will be responsible for finding ways to grow the Radeon brand's shrinking market share, how to make a play in the mobile IP space, change the dynamic between developers and AMD, and how working with console vendors like MS and Sony makes sense going forward. In many ways this is a return to the structure that made ATI so successful as a player in the GPU space and AMD is definitely hoping this move can turn things around.
Good luck Raja!
Read AMD's full press release after the break.
AMD Forms Radeon Technologies Group To Enhance Focus on Graphics And Immersive Computing Under The Leadership of Raja Koduri
- Strategic realignment to strengthen performance in traditional graphics markets and establish initiatives for leadership in emerging immersive computing opportunities in VR and AR —
SUNNYVALE, Calif. — Sept. 9, 2015 — AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) today announced the promotion of Raja Koduri (47) to senior vice president and chief architect, Radeon Technologies Group, reporting to president and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. In his expanded role, Koduri is responsible for overseeing all aspects of graphics technologies used in AMD’s APU, discrete GPU, semi-custom, and GPU compute products.
“We are entering an age of immersive computing where we will be surrounded by billions of brilliant pixels that enhance our daily lives in ways we have yet to fully comprehend,” said Dr. Su. “AMD is well positioned to lead this transition with graphics IP that powers the best gaming and visual computing experiences today. With the creation of the Radeon Technologies Group we are putting in place a more agile, vertically-integrated graphics organization focused on solidifying our position as the graphics industry leader, recapturing profitable share across traditional graphics markets, and staking leadership positions in new markets such as virtual and augmented reality.”
“AMD is one of the few companies with the engineering talent and IP to make emerging immersive computing opportunities a reality,” said Koduri. “Now, with the Radeon Technologies Group, we have a dedicated team focused on growing our business as we create a unique environment for the best and brightest minds in graphics to be a part of the team re-defining the industry.”
Koduri has more than 20 years of hands-on experience advancing the visual computing experience on personal computers, from content creation to GPU system architecture and design. Koduri most recently was responsible for driving AMD’s visual and accelerated computing innovations, including the development of the industry’s first graphics chip with integrated High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) to deliver new levels of performance in smaller, more power-efficient graphics cards. Koduri has also been responsible for leading AMD’s LiquidVR™ initiative to deliver the best possible virtual reality (VR) experiences through the development of new technologies and partnerships designed to make everything from gaming to VR cinema every bit as immersive and interactive as the real world. He joined AMD from Apple, where he was director of graphics architecture. Prior to joining Apple, Koduri served in a range of graphics leadership roles at AMD and ATI. Koduri holds a Master of Technology degree in Electronics and Communications from IIT Kharagpur, India.
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About AMD
For more than 45 years, AMD has driven innovation in high-performance computing, graphics, and visualization technologies ― the building blocks for gaming, immersive platforms, and the datacenter. Hundreds of millions of consumers, leading Fortune 500 businesses, and cutting-edge scientific research facilities around the world rely on AMD technology daily to improve how they live, work, and play. AMD employees around the world are focused on building great products that push the boundaries of what is possible. For more information about how AMD is enabling today and inspiring tomorrow, visit the AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) website, blog, Facebook and Twitter pages.
Game over man… Game over
Game over man… Game over Nvidia. Now it’s time to buy an AMD card so that i can play my duke nukem forever. My computer is now the greatest. I am now Master Racist
Laughed out pretty Loud
Laughed out pretty Loud
ATI did so well because AMD
ATI did so well because AMD way overpaid for them! But aside from great corporate boondoggles, I have been hoping AMD can pull it a rabbit out of the hat. If wishes were fishes….
Good move, but…I wonder if
Good move, but…I wonder if this suffices?
Also, there’s this thing apparently going on: http://wccftech.com/amd-nasdaq-selling-20-percent-shares-private-equity-silver-lake
What’s going on is very
What’s going on is very simple to anyone who knows how corporations work: AMD is preparing to spin off the old ATI unit. There’s no other reason to suddenly make Radeon it’s own business entity unless you wanted to make it easier to sell or spin off.
You’re seeing part one of the AMD breakup. AMD is out of cash, and Silver Lake is coming in, spinning off the unprofitable portions of the company, in the hopes of increasing AMD’s stock price through what they see as the most valuable parts of the company.
It’s good to see more
It’s good to see more competent management given the responsibility of running AMD’s new graphics technology group. GPU’s for compute are going to be very important going forward, and the GPUs ability to have more compute workloads offloaded from the CPU to the GPU will become of even greater impotence in the server/workstation/HPC market, as well as the gaming market(Vulkan/DX12). Putting the entire GPU management hierarchy under one very capable person who will be able to manage AMD’s entry into the HPC/workstation APU market, and begin the process of utilizing AMD’s HSA asynchronous compute for more than just consumer market based systems. The entire mobile market is already taking advantage of HSA and GPGPU to enable more to be done on HSA complaint GPUs from AMD and others in the HSA foundation members’ many new SOC products from its affiliated SOC/GPU/other producers.
The whole computing industry will be moving in the direction of taking advantage of all that massively parallel resources on the GPUs hundreds/thousands of FP units. Games that once were forced to only rely on the limited FP/other computational resources of the CPU will now be able to fully take advantage of those many GPU cores and transfer most of the computationally intensive workloads onto the GPUs with their vastly superior numbers of execution resources. This offloading of compute from CPU to GPU is just beginning to be realized and AMD’s hardware/software foresight is beginning to pay off for AMD and others who took the time to collectively invest in HSA and the promise of GPU compute for any and all computer workloads. AMD’s is not the only one investing in HSA, just look at the membership list of the HSA foundation and see that the GPGPU/HSA era has definitely arrived.
Edit: impotence
To:
Edit: impotence
To: importance
Freud.png
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CPUs suck for computing, not
CPUs suck for computing, not enough FP resources, Nvidia’s GPUs sucks(currently) for computing compared to AMD, not enough hardware asynchronous compute ability. To hell with those puny CPUs and the folks that are still harping them as the future of compute. It’s time to tell the chip pimps at Intel to F-off, and it’s time for more computing of all kinds to be done on the GPU’s cores, there’s a whole lot more compute ability on the GPU than on any CPU, even for Nvidia’s stripped down of compute ability SKUs.
The world is not about only gaming performance so the gaming only Gits need to be ignored. There are a lot more graphics, and compute uses for GPUs than simply gaming, and gaming should not be a reason for the gimping Nvidia style of the general purpose compute on all consumer GPUs. CPUs are for running the OS and other housekeeping chores, it’s the GPUs that run the game’s graphics and the more gaming compute/graphics compute run on the GPU the better for gaming and a lot of other workloads. AMD’s Zen CPUs do not have to perform above Intel’s CPUs because computing is moving in the direction of doing more on the GPU’s cores gaming/otherwise for ANY puny CPU’s core/IPC counts to matter.
Who cares about the crappy CPUs thay are too costly for the number of cores/FP resources that they provide, the future of compute in on the GPU, and the CPU is just there to run the OS.
The only thing that I can say
The only thing that I can say about this is…Buy AMD stock now! This is a “catalyst” move! This is what I have been waiting for since 2005.
Or at least the seeds of it!
Or at least the seeds of it!
Crazy idea, but I think
Crazy idea, but I think they’re going to spin off or sell discrete graphics. Not sure how that would work since the APUs use the same architecture. AMD basically is burning cash and needs money from somewhere.
I’ve been saying this for
I’ve been saying this for months now. If AMDs quarterly losses remain in the $200 Million per quarter range, AMD would run out of cash before the Zen release. The X86 license is non-transferable, AMD doesn’t have the greatest patent portfolio, so the most valuable part of the company that can be sold off for immediate cash is the GPU division. The move to make Radeon a separate business entity is the first step toward making that happen.
How does this get me closer
How does this get me closer to a 16gig shared HBM 14nm APU?