Radeon Technologies Group SVP and Chief Architect Raja Koduri is taking sabbatical from AMD as of today, with a target return date in December. As first reported by our friends at Fudzilla (and also Tweaktown), and that I was able to confirm through AMD this evening, one of our favorite people in the graphics industry will be stepping aside for the time being. AMD CEO Lisa Su will be taking over the Radeon Technologies Group in the interim.
Raja is a great personality and innovator in the graphics market and I was able to interview him during the Polaris roll out last year. He was candid, open to ideas, and clearly cared about the gamers and PC gaming market. It was only in September of 2015 that he returned to AMD as the leader of the newly created Radeon Technologies Group, a division of AMD rededicated to graphics leadership.
AMD Radeon Technologies Group SVP, Raja Koduri
The easy response to this news, and the most common reaction, will be to assume that Raja was pushed out and will not return due to the state of the Radeon division after the launch of Vega. But in truth, despite it having issues with efficiency and performance that we noted in our reviews, AMD has had no issue selling the Vega cards its made. The professional markets are competitive again and AMD's entrance into the enterprise compute space opens up a wide array of new opportunity for AMD architectures.
Nor has it had issues selling Radeon RX 400 or RX 500 products either. Whether you consider that good planning by Raja and his team or just the luck of the cryptocurrency market, it really doesn't matter. The Radeon group has provided value to the company and to shareholders.
The Radeon Vega family of graphics cards
As with most things in life, the truth is likely more complex than we can decipher from a single note or message. I was able to get my hands on the letter sent from Raja to his team, which I have provided below:
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
Straight from the man himself, the intention and reason for the leave appears to be to catch up on family responsibility. As someone who has often traded work-related travel for home-based committments in future months, I understand this completely.
I have no doubt that Raja takes this leave with some reluctance. He built this team himself (for the most part) and my conversations with AMD employees always mention respect and appreciation for what he has been able to do. He loves the industry, he loves the technology, he loves the fans. That doesn't mean he can't or won't leave or be forced out if comes down to it, but it does give me hope that the potential for his return after the sabbatical is better than most other news outlets and pundits might lead us to believe.
For the interim, I have a lot of faith in Lisa Su to handle RTG. She has led AMD out of the CPU doldrums and into competitiveness for the first time in a decade. Any additional knowledge, experience, or input she can can gleam from her time as the lead at the Radeon Technologies Group can only be a benefit to AMD in the long run.
We will miss you Raja = KING!
We will miss you Raja = KING!
any one know what WoW realm
any one know what WoW realm Raja plays on? I assume he’s alliance
Not trying to sound
Not trying to sound pessimist, but it would be a good time for him to step down. There are many business decisions that can be attributed to Vega’s mishaps and he is burdened with the responsibility to the shareholders.
TO be honest, everything is
TO be honest, everything is fine. Sure games hate the vega card because the price and performance in games doesent add up. But in the compute space and of course crypto currency space, RTG is selling a massive shitload of vega cards.
The shareholders are fine, they want to see some revenue and they get it. From what type of customer doesent matter. If vega sells well(wich it does) every shareholder is happy
AMD got a super tight supply
AMD got a super tight supply of 14nm wafers, they dont need much to sell all they make (not many)
You can see that for some time now (months) of little to no availability. (not because they sell large amount, but because they sell the little they make)
Hmm I do wonder how many of
Hmm I do wonder how many of the gamer cards they sell here in Sweden. The online store Komplett, got there latest batch (about a week ago). I think they recieved about 150 give or take a few, of the Vega 64 cards. That’s Sapphire and XFX cards, and they still have 50 sapphire and 69 XFX cards left, which is quite surprising. Those cards should have been sold in a heart beat.
And by the way, it does not have anything to do with the pricing, because these have the MSRP.
https://www.komplett.se/search?q=vega+64
I see no willingness to move
I see no willingness to move quantity, the margins must be quite small and AMD must see it as not even worth producing it.
If AMD wanted/needed to slot that card in the 700$ range to cover cost, and is not able due to performance, I don’t expect to even try to sell the product and that seems to be the case.
Where Raja is involved.
The decision of going HBM2 was a business decision and not an engineering one as you can imagine. Designing a product dependent on another manufacturer’s not yet ready supply can ONLY be an order from above. And what do you get? Move expensive RAM with less BW, mem controller redesigns(HBCC, GDDR+HBM controller), expenses on MCM designs and low supply on ram stacks.
Green-lighting the architecture for production was a business decision as well. Whereas they should have cut their losses in RnD, launch a slightly smaller lower clocked efficient vega(vega11?) with GDDR to replace the 580. The decision could have been taken as early as May 2016 when GTX1080 launched and there is no way vega has been in production since then.
If all these was inherited by the previous leadership with contracts etc I can understand this, if not, Lisa should take hold of Radeon Group for a while to point them to the light.
“We entered the high-end
“We entered the high-end gaming, professional workstation and machine intelligence markets with Vega in a very short period of time.”
This is like reading the speech from a politician, who was a prime minister for the last couple of years and sees a big election defeat coming straight to him, trying to convince voters and party supporters that things aren’t how they look they are, but in fact much much better.
AMD hasn’t entered the hi end gaming, maybe hi end mining and Vega took too much time to finish, considering it only offers better compute performance. At the same time it took RTG to shrink Fiji and add compute support to it, Nvidia not only did that, not only improved also in efficiency and clock speeds, but also created and implemented Tensor units in it’s designs.
While I always say that AMD doesn’t have money and personnel to keep pace with Nvidia and Intel and that Vega and Ryzen where just the best they could do with their limited resources, this is the speech of a politician.
I see the same. This was
I see the same. This was written for his next employer.
“to no fault of my own” … sincerely yours.
Raja never grew into the
Raja never grew into the position, he simply wasn’t cut to be VP / group president material.
He also made to many strategic mistakes, and had poor stage presence and presentation / communication as a company president.
So I personally welcome this news (news being Raja being demoted)
but it only make sense if AMD can find a competent person to run a group as complex as the RTG (an nvidia class company)
Other concern… is there any room at AMD / RTG for him in december ? he might be grossly overpaid as an architect.
My hope…. for a reason or another, Apple want him back.
He’s not an actor to worry
He’s not an actor to worry about stage presence, it’s the background work that matters.
I doubt Lisa Su would
I doubt Lisa Su would accommodate Raja’s request for a sabbatical unless he was still valuable to AMD (and RTG).
Just because Raja built RTG, does not mean he is the best choice of maintaining RTG – and that is not a criticism of his ability to lead and execute. Everything you chose to do is something else you are choosing not to do.
Two things I want to draw attention to:
That seems like very good news to me. Raja doing what he does best now that RTG has its operational infrastructure and development methodology in place. RTG need to look to Navi and beyond now. Lead times are long.
and…
Does that mean that Raja will resume leadership after his return? No, he’s clearly stated his focus will be changing at year end.
And if Lisa were taking over RTG for the foreseeable future then it would not make sense for her to take over temporarily and then permanently.
So, we can expect new leadership of RTG that is not Dr. Su.
I’ll be interested to see who they pick, very interested.
Raja has done fantastically well as RTG’s founder and leader, and I think the criticisms of RTG on the gaming front take for granted the value of their deeper push into the professional markets.
RTG professional is to RTG gaming as Epyc is to Ryzen – the potential for RTG to pay its own way forward (considering how huge their staff expansion has been lately, and their current market share in gaming) does not lie in the hands of gamers.
Yes, gamers buy high margin cards… but relative to professional markets?…
RTG will never be a one trick pony, and had Vega’s gaming perf been superior at the cost of weaker professional lines, we gamers would all suffer for it in the long run.
RTG is more than just gaming. It is professional, it is embedded and it is semi-custom too.
“I doubt Lisa Su would
“I doubt Lisa Su would accommodate Raja’s request for a sabbatical unless he was still valuable to AMD (and RTG)”
That assumes that the “sabbatical” is not effectively a firing while he rides out the rest of some contract or agreement. This practice is really common where non-competes are an issue, the person on leave collects a salary while not being exposed to any new internal proprietary info for the remainder of their non-compete duration.
Raja does not call the shots
Raja does not call the shots at RTG except for engineering decisions and Raja answers to those above and even Lisa serves at the pleasure of AMD’s BOD and majority stock holders. AMD is not there to solely entertain only fickle gamers, and one month off before holiday time Thanksgiving to New Years can easily add up to more than one month with everybody and their dog getting Thanksgiving to new years off anyways for the higher ups in any company.
Raja has earned his comp time over the past few years between Polaris and Vega where Raja had little time to rest. Get Over Yourselves Gamers! It’s not Raja job to fix your little gamer ego issues some of you gamers have, AMD is a compute company from CPU to GPU(Compute/AI is big Money Now) and Raja is a valuable Engineer/Lead Engineer so take the financial issues up with those higher up the chain of command than Raja, it’s the ones that control the purse strings that are more to blame that Raja!
I bet Raja is a COD fan and
I bet Raja is a COD fan and has an early release of COD WWII so now he can play on his Threadripper/Vega rig to his heart’s content!
P.S. He deserves some time off. I bet the RTG marketing division is shaking in it’s boots.
I think its funny how people
I think its funny how people forget that Raja has yet to release a product that he started since he started as VP of RTG. He stepped in during the development of Polaris and Vega.
some people think he is demoted? when this is just a long vacation.
EXACTLY. Raja’s first product
EXACTLY. Raja’s first product will be Navi. That’s something I really want to see.
Well Raja will get some Raja
Well Raja will get some Raja time and taking one month off around the standard holiday time adds up to a few months time to decompress before total burnout sets in! So Raja can decide if he wants to return to the madhouse that is the consumer side of the GPU market.
I think that gamers are the most self-entitled bunch who would abandon their own mothers for a few extra FPS and the modern GPU Industry is not only about gaming, just Look and What JHH of Nvidia has done in the GPU compute market with the AI market just beginning to heat up.
Gamers are misdirecting their anger at Raja when they should be angry at SK Hynix for not getting AMD the needed HBM2 supplies in a timely manner allowing Samsung to become the only supplier of sorts until SK Hynix can get its competing HBM2 supplies to AMD and reduce the pricing pressures on HBM2.
Gamers should have been each at least purchasing a few shares of AMD’s stock and with millions of gamers out there wanting AMD parts, miners included, then maybe Lisa could have given RTG the necessary funding needed to produce both a compute focused GPU micro-arch and a stripped of compute(To save on power), and MORE ROP/TMU focused, gaming GPU Micro architecture. Raja tweeted exactly that when he stated that Vega 10 had to compete with GP100, GP102, and GP104 because Raja/RTG was only given the funding for one Vega micro-arch that will eventually be able to replace most of AMD’s professional and gaming oriented product stacks given the time and money required from an AMD that now has its Zen/Ryzen and Zen/Epyc revenues to put to good use across all of AMD’s respective divisions.
Gamers who would do nothing but complain should just buy Nvidia or they should have at least purchased a few shares of AMD stock a few years back and given Lisa/AMD enough extra Equity value to have allowed Raja to have more than one team developing separate compute and gaming focused GPU micro-arch variants. It was Lisa and AMD’s BOD that where always calling the shots with their hands controlling RTG’s purse strings and Raja had/has no control over AMD’s lack of funding with AMD just barely saved this time around by the Zen CPU micro-arch.
AMD at one time had a stock value that rivaled Nvidia’s and AMD had that $90+ dollar a share price more than a decade ago on CPU revenues alone(Opteron Server Revenues Mostly), as AMD had yet to purchase ATI. So AMD can and will be producing the necessary revenues going forward to properly Fund RTG and Raja did produce a fine GPU compute/AI focused Micro-Arch in Vega 10 that will be there along side of the Epyc SKUs to compete with Nvidia’s Best in that all important AI market that is expected to produce market revenues far in advance of not only the GPU compute market, but gaming market as well.
One need only look at AMD’s Project 47 AI super-computing platform to see where most all of AMD’s Vega 10 dies are going with that Project 47 cabinet holding a retail outlet’s allotment of Vega 10(Radeon Instinct MI25 SKUs, 80 total MI25/AI GPUs) die based SKUs and 16GB of HBM2. So Raja did complete the job that Lisa and AMD’s BOD tasked him to do! And that Professional GPU compute/AI market will provide AMD with the proper markup to make the Vega 10 Compute/AI micro-architecture a resounding success. Even without the Mining and gaming revenues that are only getting the lower binned Vega 10 and HBM2 dies, because the best dies are going to the markets that can actually pay what Vega 10 is worth.
So gamers if you could not would not purchase AMD GPU’s then how did you assume that AMD would have the revenues to begin to product the gaming only focused GPU micro-architectural variants! If you could have just purchased a few shares of AMD stock a few years back at less than the price of a Starbucks frappuccino then each gamers investment would have added up to millions of extra dollars of equity value and given Lisa more latitude. How do you think Nvidia is able to get those GP100, GP102, and GP104 products created when it’s very obvious that Nvidia charges more and get more revenues to fund all those GPU micro-architectural variants and Mobile first GPU designs that are so stripped of compute to save on power that they are useless for anything but mostly gaming.
AMD should really double down on GPU compute/AI and raise its gaming GPU prices because the Professional markets will buy and so will the miners, and gamers who can not afford the necessary higher GPU costs to fund the proper amounts of R&D and engineering costs should be priced out of the GPU market and be forced onto console gaming as that’s funded by Microsoft and Sony, and others, and not AMD. AMD is just the hired sub-contractor for the Console Parts.
AMD is back with or without gamers being the sole source of AMD’s revenues so do not expect that AMD will be dependent on that fickle consumer gaming market only ever again. Nvidia sure is not totally dependent on gamers either and Nvidia is mostly in the GPU market with a much smaller presence than AMD in the CPU/SOC market.
AMD is back, with or without gamers, and Vega 10 will sell regardless of what the gamers think a GPU should provide, those other markets for GPUs have much deeper pockets than any fickle gamers will ever have!
What Raja’s Memo Said:
“RTG
What Raja’s Memo Said:
“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”
Sounds Burnt Out to me, but comp time is earned and comp time running sequentially with holiday time is doubly good for dealing with excutive burn-out and all work and no play makes Raja do that Jack Nicholson in that shining movie thing throug Lisa’s office Door, so Raja needs ome comp-time to decompress!
source: WCCFTech, via copy and paste, from some actual source with a actual source that WCCFTech(Copy-Past-Tech) likes to Copy-Paste from!
That memo is literally IN the
That memo is literally IN the story, sourced by me…. You okay?
Yes sleep deprived and
Yes sleep deprived and brain-dead so no I’m not OK. But that’s not the question it’s more of a swipe at WCCFTech and the whole gaming/reporting cut and paste sorts of reporting that goes on for clicks and kicks on other’s work(Yours and AnandTechs, VideoCardz, etc.) that gets used, but you can Remove the Re-post or the entire post if repeating the information is such an issue.
Raja sure is burnt out and in need of his properly earned comp-time and no one has the right to argue against the work that Raja has done with the meager resorces he was allotted from his higher-ups at AMD. And AMD has ATI’s GPU IP to use for compute/AI and AMD will do well Gamers or Not with it’s Epyc and Vega 10 SKUs it the professional market.
Maybe AMD would be better off hiring some talking head to do RTG’s public relations work and let Raja focus on doing his main job of getting that Compute/AI Vega 10 fully online and let some Joe Isuzu/marketing type humor the gamers until AMD can come up with a gaming only focuesd design to compete with Nvidia’s Mobile first(Starting with Maxwell) sorts of designs that Take some millions to develop.
Lisa Sue Knows of AMD’s stock history very well and that stock history is mainly CPUs(Opteron and Now Epyc) and Vega 10 is a good compute design relative to Nvidia’s(See that Techgage article on consumer Vega 10’s compute performance even relative to a Nvidia Quadro P6000) Pascal micro-arch with Vega 20 going to a 1/2 DP FP to SP FP ratio as opposed to Vega 10’s current 1/16 DP FP to SP FP ratio. Vega 10 is going to do very well in the markets that can afford the proper markups to fund the proper amounts of driver resources and that compute/AI market’s revenues is going to always be larger than any cosumer market from now on.
Maybe you didn’t notice but
Maybe you didn’t notice but you replayed under another name, you are always funny and your stile is quite recognizable anyway but this mistake was funny 😀
Shit happens, but I could
Shit happens, but I could have copied it directly from this article but instead did my copy-paste from the copy pasting king’s at WCCFTech. But you Know it’s getting harder and harder to even understand why I TL:DR-ed the full article here which included Raja’s memo and it is funny to most so that’s great to not be me and it will not be my last F-up for sure or my worst. I’ll top that for sure!
But Raja is getting to much blame for things that Raja had no control over and Raja is allright by me for being able to get AMD’s RTG up and running and making the best of what mess Raja was handed on Day One when he was given control over the newly created RTG division. Really Raja managed to produce 2 newer GCN based product designs that he did not even have much say in creating in the first place with Polaris(For The mainstream market) and Vega(For Compute and High End gaming market). And Raja got the best performance he could with the budget(Almost Thin Air) he had to work with, what with AMD diverting its lifes remaining blood into its last chance Zen CPU micro-arch gamble that paid off big time for AMD.
People should be amazed that Raja is not in a padded room as most folks would be putting in those kinds of hours over a few years time with RTG running on the fumes off of AMD’s Zen fumes for Zen’s R&D funding and still getting an acceptable Polaris showing and a Damn Good Vega 10 compute GPU micro-arch up and Running to complement Epyc in the server room for compute(not bad at gaming also). And a Vega 10 AI IP to get AMD’s foot in the door for that all new AI market that will lift both AMD’s and Nvidia’s boats above the relatively stagnent consumer gaming GPU market’s anemic revenue growth figures of the last few years.
Damn some of the gamers haven’t the slightest clue what is involved in bringing any high technology product to market or the realization that software is never a completely done job even up to the time that one GPU micro-arch is replaced by another. And the new DX12/Vulkan graphics APIs are still not used across the gaming market even one or two years after their introductions. No basis in realty for some gamers but I guess that’s the nature of the gaming/entertainment business anyways.
Raja probably does not like the limelights, ditto for Jim Keller and other very smart folks, including a lot of programmers/software engineers. Get over yourselves some of you Raja critics, most gamers/Raja critics would not last a New York Nanosecond trying to fill Raja’s shoes!
So…no livestreams with Raja
So…no livestreams with Raja in the foreseeable future? 🙁
AMD will be doing more
AMD will be doing more professional market closed live streaming to only those markets and maybe a few short cameo appearances with Raja in a white labcoat. You Know the hi how are you, wave wave sorts of things far away from the 3 ring madness that is the consumer gaming market. With the way Anand left Anandtech and is working for Apple and Wasson went to AMD one can almost see the writing on the wall for the the next generation of consoles that may just be all that there is available for the gaming market. With all the compute potential in GPUs, I’d expect that PC gaming to get less and less attention as more folks are driven away by the high costs of GPUs.
JHH over at Nvidia already enjoys those mad professional market mark-ups and some relatively high mark-ups with Nvidia’s consumer SKUs getting the higher cost mark-up that allows for Nvidia to keep the various GP 104/102 GPU consumer variant design teams employed. So maybe AMD’s gaming market share is not that vital anymore as AMD’s Professional Epyc Sales will put any makers’ consumer GPU revenues in the rearview mirror. JHH likes that Car AI market and AMD will have its project 47 supercomputer in one very tall rack(20 Epyc CPUs and 80 Vega 10 Based Radeon MI25 GPU SKUs), ditto for any others that may produce other specilized AI processors.
GPUs are going to have to cost more to meet gamers inflated expetations so maybe why Raja is away Lisa can raise the cost of all AMD’s consumer SKUs that have more attraction for the compute markets and thin have Raja when he returns get Vega Nano out the door and some Vega 11 variants to replace the mainstream Polaris SKUs, and if gamers complaing then Lisa can point to JHH over at Nvidia and say look JHH is resing prices also and proper GPU engineering doe not come at a low cost anymore, if gamers want every bell and whistle working on day one.
Usually wanting all the latest GPU features working from day one requires more money or they do not happen so there gamers you want it all yesterday then it’s time to pay greater prices for all the staff needed for that to occur! GPUs are going to cost Bigly from now on, and gamers can not have what they are not willing to pay for.
Executive responsible for
Executive responsible for product that arrived a year late and can barely catch up to the competitors lower tier year old tech (for its core use community anyway).
Of course he needs to “spend more time with family”. Its a time honored tradition for guys in this situation. Turns out he’s not so good at running a GPU division… definitely a good time to see if he can master being a house husband and dad. If all goes well in Q4, Raja will have found his place.
For what its worth… I like being a dad.
Professional companies
Professional companies usually have professional markets that can and do pay the proper mark-up to support a product’s R&D and better drivers that cost millions more to develop. And even consumer Vega is beating some Quadro P6000 and Titan XP SKU on some compute benchmarks over at over at Techgage where the Vega and Nvidia SKUs where tested.
Raja did his Primary Job that Lisa and AMD’s BOD wanted in creating a Vega 10 Compute/AI GPU micro-arch, and just look at those 80 Radeon MI25(Vega 10 die based) SKUs and 20/32 core Epyc CPU SKUs that are used in that Project 47 Supercomputer and tell me that Raja is to blame for doing his job correctly.
So Gaming and Gamers get the not so cherry Vega 10 dies from the 95% Vega 10 BIN and the 5% die Bin with the Very Cherry Vega 10 dies going into the MI25’s and Radeon Pro WX offerings with their 16GB of top binned HBM2! And the gaming Mooks get what they will pay for after they fight the miners over those Non Cherry Vega 10 die based consumer variants.
Raja did great with Vega 10 and those Compute/AI Vega 10 Very Cherry dies will earn AMD the proper markup that the gamers do not appear to be able to pay.
Oh those poor little gaming Mooks crying about those bad bad miners, AMD is laughing all the way to the bank and so are AMD’s retail Channel partners!
So how’s that spawn of yours doing now that it has found out that its father is a big old man/child and does that spawn of yours have webbed hands and feet!
Right move from Lisa Su, once
Right move from Lisa Su, once again.
The only thing dragging AMD’s stock market performance down is RTG’s mistakes, not technology.
The head of those mistakes is Raja.
This is good news for shareholders.
Btw…
That offering of the
Btw…
That offering of the offered (at the spot) RED camera to his friend from Bollywood, was for me the last drop in what seems to be taking RTG for a sponsored playground.
Where is he going to be in the future?
My bet is in making movies.
The gamers hold on AMD’s
The gamers hold on AMD’s stock market prices ended when Epyc was to market, Helped along by Vega 10’s compute/AI power more than any Vega 10 gaming power(That’s not too shabby by the way). So the days of any fickle and unwashed gamers having that much of an affect on AMD revenue streams are over for good.
Raja earned his comp-time and both Raja and Lisa(As the head of AMD) and AMD BOD as Lisa’s boss negoiated Raja’s leave to follow with the holidays to add a few more weeks onto Raja’s leave as a job well done. And Lisa herself has said that AMD’s days of low pricing where over, and they are for the consumer markets that leech off the professional market revenues!
So you gamers will have to pay AMD or Pay Nvidia beacuse AMD can get more Vega revenues from the professional compute/AI markets and gamers without the money can not talk above the markets that can and will pay a better price for Vega 10’s compute even before the miners jump into the way to bid up the Polaris/Vega prices from below.
JHH looks at a little more than Half of Nvidia’s revenues compming from GPU/consumer sales and JHH worries about that. And that’s because the consumer GPU gaming market is not really growing larger for both AMD and Nvidia. It’s just that both AMD and Nvidia have to struggle for a market share in a consumer gaming hardware market that has lost most of its rapid growth potential relative to the compute/AI markets that will have the mad growth rates and produce the mad revenues for the future.
So even Nvidia Knows that its professional/other GPU market segement will soon begin to surpass Nvidia’s consumer only GPU revenue stream! And JHH is not speaking about gaming at the big eveent more than he is speaking about autos and AI where Nvidia will see that revenue growth overtake any relatively fixed consumer gaming GPU market revenues that Nvidia has to battle AMD for. So Both Lisa at AMD and JHH at Nvidia know where the real future is and that’s not so good news for gamers Green or Red!
Agree.
And that’s another
Agree.
And that’s another mistake from Raja’s RTG, because the power consumption and temps are not inline with the needs of content and AI datacenters.
Besides, in youtube’s watch?v=24rFeHo1S-o we can see a very confused Raja regarding the priorities of the graphics market.
Vague and mixed signaling to shareholders about his organization’s milestones and aiming is never a good practice in leadership.
Btw… no gamer here.
Do you take me for some
Do you take me for some egregious fool, The Cherry Vaga 10 dies in those MI25 AI SKUs are from the top of the top bins and the AI/Server products are always clocked lower so go and research A Those project 47 GFlops/Watts metrics because your one good eye, and bad eye as well, is only connected to a single cell floating in an ocean of blubber.
Even AMD’s Consumer Vega 10 SKUs are defeating the Quadro P6000 and Titan XP on some compute workloads in that Techgage article on Vega’s compute performance. And Vega 10/MI25 SKUs are getting the very top thermally performing Vega 10 dies that are again always clocked lower than any consumer parts to get that best GFlops/Watts metrics.
AMD has already entered into multi-million dollar agreements with some very large Asian market businesses that have 70-400 billion dollar market caps so they are by no means small or insignificant.
No gamer you are but from your comments you are on par with that daft gamer mentality most assuredly. AMD’s Epyc SKUs have lower power usage metrics than Intel’s AVX heavy designs that are not needed for most server workloads, and AMD was smart in relying on its GPU IP for those customers who need any hevy FP workloads done using AMD’s GPUs that have great Performanec/Watt metrics and way more DP FP compute 1/16 DP FP to SP FP ratio on Vega compared to 1/32 DP FP to SP FP ratio for Pascal, and Vega 20 is getting 1/2 ratio!
You are clueless and it shows!
Hey look…
I use ONLY AMD
Hey look…
I use ONLY AMD since K6-II (Super7).
AMD is by far the most inovative/disruptive company in the field. Their competitors know it.
Epyc is amazing.
Ryzen is power to the people. Again.
Vega MI25 is beating Quadros in GFlops/Watt. Consuming more nevertheless.
But this is a comparison between the LATEST arch RTG has to offer against “paxwel” (maxwell on steroids) called Pascal. An SKU that wasn’t even on Nvidia’s roadmap.
Unfortunately, Nvidia has a much better power consumption and thermals, making it more suitable to make the next Vega killer in compute DCs. Just like that.
This is what Vega was promissed to do. Computing more, consuming less. Much less being compared with the consumer SKUs of it.
Maybe 7nm will solve it and prepares RTG for what to come from Nvidia.
This is what Raja should have done.
But he stumbled (twice) on the mindset you acuse me of. See the video in the previous post.
And remeber, it’s Raja were talking here. His mistakes and lack of strategic vision.
Not AMD, much less myself or yourself, for that matter.
Get to stepping gaming Mook,
Get to stepping gaming Mook, AMD’s professional Vega 10 Compute/AI Vega 10 based SKUs have the compute/AI performance/watt metrics that will get AMD the sales figures to rival any consumer sales figures! And the Vega 10 top binned dies with the best thermal/low leakage performance metrics are only used for the Professional Vega SKUs. And Those MI25’s/Radeon Pro WX SKUs are clocked lower and curnch the numbers with some damn good performance/watt metrics, as they sre not stripped of SPs/Compute like Nvidia’s products are.
Raja did his job and that’s making the Vega 10 compute/AI focused Vega 10 GPU micro-arch that can game well enough also. So GTFO with that gaming only gaming MOOK mentality!
Look for the extra gaming performance on Vega the consumer variants as that will be incoming with the firmware/driver side tweaks as usual, but that professional Epyc/Radeon WX/Instinct market’s money talks and those crying Gaming Mooks can walk!
You GTFO. You delusional sick
You GTFO. You delusional sick stalking primate.
Man that single brain cell in
Man that single brain cell in that sea of lipids is sure Triggered, but why are you taking it out on Steve Ballmer!
Lmao. Now, that was
Lmao. Now, that was funny.
See? You’re better as a commediant.
But face it:
The word is out.
We all saw Raja’s mail.
All simptoms of – at least – a demotion are obvious.
And yet,
Lisa Su is wrong, AMD’s BOD is wrong, the stock is wrong… and only Mr Neanderthal there, was right.
Sure Vega will mature, drivers patched & so on… but the timming is lost. For now.
And it’s also obvious that Raja is a good man that doesn’t even know how to lie.
What do they call it nowadays?… social skills! that’s it.
But AMD is in a 2 front dirty war for a long time and needs and deserves to win it.
Although, 1 front is already won and the position secured.
Keep up the good fight. Just clean the scope a bit.
No, not a de-motion more of a
No, not a de-motion more of a side-motion, with Raja wanting to distance himself from all of that marketing madness that goes on in the consumer markets targeting those with large amounts of lipids surrounding single floating and enfeebled brain cell that are so easily triggered and in need of those kinds of super-ego satiation.
Look at Jim Keller’s Interviews he was also not so comfortable at times with all the base madness from that gaming market attention that was directed his way with his Zen project management workloads. And Raja is no different and look at the way Jim Keller moves around to where the Jobs take him. But Raja has his Navi Project to complete after having to deal with the demands of getting RTG’s pump primed and getting the Polaris/Vega projects, that landed in his lap after he took the reins of the newly created RTG, completed with all those problems needing so much time and attention.
Raja has now completed that task of putting the Polaris/Vega project behind him and devoting all of his time towards getting that modular/scalable Navi GPU micro-arch to market that will give AMD the same abilities to create GPU SKUs in a similar fashion as AMD has done for the Zeppelin Die based Zen/Epyc/Threadripper/Ryzen line of CPU products. There are others at AMD to be tasked with the Driver/software work that is never ending with respect to tapping Vega’s full hardware feature sets that have uses across compute/AI and the gaming markets, including the non-gaming graphics and visualization markets.
Both Raja and Jim are some very smart folks that you do not want wasting their time with the public facing parts of the business but that you need managing the technical parts or nothing can be built. And nothing can be designed without science/engineering folks in charge to manage large teams of other science/engineering folks and that what Raja does best same as Keller. Give the gamers a song and dance bumpkin with loads of new and shiny in the form of some marketing Talking Head and let the science/engineering folk do their job, and that job is most certainly not to entertain some fragile ego driven unwashed gamer masses who are and always will be relatively clueless!
“fickle and unwashed gamers”
“fickle and unwashed gamers” really?
Do you see Gamers as some form of inferior race that multiplies like vermin and needs to be exterminated?
Why don’t you ask the person
Why don’t you ask the person who wrote that?
As far as I’m concearned I “agree” with the mentioned direction of the graphics market.
The rest, I ignored. Has you should too.
Most Fanboy Gamers are lower
Most Fanboy Gamers are lower than whale poop, damn crying self-entitled bastards! Tax the hell out of their GPU’s and use the money for carbon neutral enegry production, including thorium reactors at all current nuke plants to burn off most all of that nuke waste(and produce more enegry while doing it) in those nuke plant cooling ponds!
Yes most Nuke Plants still have functioning steam turbines so build thorium reactors on those Nuke Plant sites as thorium reactors to dispose of the waste that way and get some more power generated in the process!
A $5 dollar GPU tax on all GPU’s sold, that should earn enough funds and kill 2 birds with one stone.
As for Fanboy gamers well a good old Mark-41 H-bomb with 25 megatons of Fanboy Gamer busting glory would fix that problem real good!
“kill 2 birds with one
“kill 2 birds with one stone.”
What a sweet, heart melting and echology centric expression.
Please, let me retribute the
Please, let me retribute the interest:
And you colesdav, what do you think of gamers?
Feel free to answer, but this time try not to infer inflated bias.
Much love,
A MOOK
I hope Raja Koduri gets the
I hope Raja Koduri gets the time with his family and the rest that he likely needs after the work he has done over the past few years.
It has been exhausting at times just trying to keep up with and testing the improvements, new features, products and architecures from the Radeon Techonolgies Group.
As an owner and user of mostly AMD Discrete GPU’s I think things improved significantly over the past two years.
AMD Radeon Crimson ReLive has improved the User Interface to the Drivers. Polaris improved AMD Perfomance/Power Consumption significantly and is serious technical competitor the GTX 1060 and below. Crossfire (DX11) and MultiGPU (DX12) support on AAA titles is overall much better allowing a pair of RX480/580 to perform around GTX1080 levels.
I do hope this is just Raja taking time off to be with his family and I hope that he returns to continue his overall great work improving GPU Architectures at AMD.
Having said all of the above, I think the Vega Marketing Campaign and Launch have been pretty bad, especially in light of how Vega is performing at the moment, and the pricing and lack of availability of cards. The last minute FreeSync versus GSync demos especially felt like a tenuous last minute ‘smoke and mirrors’ effort to me.
Then after the reviews of RX Vega were done, statements started coming out about RX Vega having the “largest dynamic power range of any GPU” … I started to put my head in my hands, close my eyes and shake my head at that point to be honest.
Vega is late, the drivers do not seem to be ready still, and whilst it’s Compute Performance is looking good, gaming Performance/Power is not where it needs to be.
I get the impression that AMD fans who waited for Vega have either:
1. Bought RX Vega/Vega FE and are unhappy about the drivers situation (Wattman still not working well, Gaming Mode on Vega FE, No Crossfire in the drivers etc).
2. Are still patiently waiting and hoping to see if RX Vega/Vega FE will perform better with new VBIOS/Driver improvements. I think these AMD Users/Fans need some feedback about what the plans are for Vega moving forward.
3. Have thrown in the towel with Vega and gone off to buy an Nvidia Card instead.
Also AMD seem to have made a couple of decisions that seem to be really bad to me, which affect users of older GPU’s this year.
1. They recently ( 17.4.4 WHQL/17.7.1 )dropped producing new Windows 8.1 64bit drivers for any of their GPU Range <= RX480, and that will effectively force Users with Windows 8.1 64bit based systems on to Windows 10 or Linux 5 years before the official end of Microsoft Windows 8.1 64bit extended support. You can tell me that Windows 8/8.1 use is only somewhere between 6-12% of Computer OS if you want, and that Windows 7 OS % has dropped recently and everyone is moving to Windows 10 like very happy sheep according to Microsoft. That is all very well, but I have the following points. A. How many of those people who migrated to Windows 10 wanted to, and how many were "persuaded" by the automatic upgrade to Windows 10 tactics? B. If I buy a GPU for my Windows 8/8.1 build which is advertised as supporting Windows 8/8.1 in specification and on the box, I expect Drivers Support until that OS is no longer supported by Microsoft. C. If I now decide I need a new Threadripper and Vega build which only supports Windows 10 64bit, what confidence can I now have that AMD will not just decide to drop support for Windows 10 Drivers in one or two years? How do I know what I am buying? D. Windows 8.1 OS % is still > Linux OS , and Linux Drivers are still produced.
E. There are still people purchasing AMD GPU’s online and in stores thinking that they are still supported on Windows 8.1 64Bit Drivers, only to find out they are not. These people are going to AMD Support Forum and pretty much being told “tough luck”. Last driver was 17.7.1. They are also advised to try installing the latest 17.9.1 Windows 7 Driver on Windows 8.1 64bit OS, it might work but, if it doesn’t it is the Users responsibility.
This is totally and utterly unacceptable and no way to treat AMD Customers.
F. No AMD Press Release about dropping Windows 64bit GPU Drivers Support for older GPU’s. No mention of it on your own PC Perspectives program about the Radeon Crimson 17.7.2 release.
G. Nvidia still support Windows 8.1 64bit Drivers.
2. Third Party Overclocking tools like MSI AfterBurner and Sapphire Trixx have stopped being able to work with AMD Crimson ReLive Drivers since around January / February this year.
This could just be complete coincidence but it means that Owners of R9 Nano(Fury X) or R9 Fury X cards cannot overclock or underclock HBM memory any more using the latest versions of MSI Afterburner/Sapphire Trixx.
This means they cannot to compare the Performance of their R9 Nano (Fury X) / R9 Fury X cards to the Performance of the RX Vega / Vega FE on an equal basis, since overclocking of HBM2 is supported, and the memory bandwidth is significant contributer to GCN based architecture performance.
I have tested the latest versions of MSI Afterburner and Sapphire Trixx with AMD Crimson ReLiver Drivers available early 2017 – HBM overclocking works on R9 Nano(Fury X) cards in that case.
I have tested latest versions of MSI Afterburner and Sapphire Trixx with AMD Crimson ReLive Driver 17.4.4, 17.7.2, 17.8.2 17.9.1. Over/Underclocking HBM with 3rd party tools puts the GPU into a low frequency GPU/MEM Clock state.
Hopefully when Raja gets back from his well deserved holiday you can ask the above questions Ryan?
Or maybe you should be a good friend to AMD and go talk to them about it as soon as possible and see if they will rethink things and do something about this?
I think they are seriously pushing it even with their loyal AMD Users and Fans at the moment. I really want to see AMD do well in the gaming market, even if it is just so we keep some competition for Nvidia.
FYI I own both AMD and Nvidia Discrete / Mobile GPU’s and this feedback is given with the best of intentions. When Vega was late I went out and purchased a pair of R9 Nanos instead to keep me working. So they already got 1-2 Vega Purchase from me in a round about way …
I realy want to see AMD RX Vega / FE do well, I have put much effort into potential purchase of 2 RX Vega/Vega FE Liquid Edition cards but had to drop it because of the Windows 8.1 64bit O/S Support and Vega Drivers situation.
Sorry if I go on too much.
I think I maybe care too much about it.
Cheers.
Yeah you do seem to go on a
Yeah you do seem to go on a bit.
“everyone is moving to Windows 10 like very happy sheep according to Microsoft. ”
Yes that’s right. Would you rather people were still running DOS ?
Its called progress. Evolve or die, and all that.
Sounds like you have a problem with change !
Drivers get dropped because they aren’t commercially viable to support anymore. You think these decisions are made based on technology ? No they are made based on how much money they can make at a point in time. Things move on, and support is dropped.
People get too hung up on technology and think a certain way is “the only way”
I think you need to get out more. Like go outside and look at the trees or something. Or just walk around a park or something.
You sound nuts.
@Ryan, I get that Raja is a
@Ryan, I get that Raja is a Nice guy but as head of RTG he really did mess up. He inflated the marketing machine to great levels just to come out with an underwhelming product. Even worse, his tweet storm shows how out of touch he is with the reality of Vega. He made bad business decitions at every turn regarding Vega. Pure simple math shows that Vega is just Fury with more clock headroom. I was excited at the prospect of Vega when its architecture was shown but neither HBC nor tile based rendering showed any benefits compared to Fury. I think its best to look for new horizons. Press has hyped him as much as AMD hyped Vega and when the results are in, they don’t look good. AMD really needs a strong GPU foundation, a reboot just like they had with Ryzen I really believed Raja was the man for the job from your comments but now, I really think its time for the guard to change.
Best,
Nicolas
That Techgage(Testing Vega’s
That Techgage(Testing Vega’s HBCC/HBC IP) reviewer admitted that Vega’s HBC IP could not be stressed using any games that where already optimized for 8GB of VRAM, so there will have to be some benchmarks developed to tax the HBCC/HBC(HBM2) with larger textures that force Vega to treat the 8GB of HBM2 as a lsat level cache. There are some folk trying to stress Vega’s HBCC/HBC(HBM2) with 8K game mods with all GPUs(AMD/Nvidia) unable to maintain 30-60 FPS rates and Vega appears to be not doing so bad when compared to the GTX 1080ti/titan XP and even Quadro SKUs that have way more actual VRAM than Vega 64/56.
But Let me make myself perfectly clear, Vega is not just about gaming it about compute so Raja is not a crook and Raja is only a vice president in AMD over the RTG division. So Raja does not have much say over marketing decisions Raja is about GPU engineering like Jim Keller is about CPU engineering. Raja’s job is not about entertaining gamers his job is about producing Vaga as a Compute/AI for the real money maker for AMD that professional Epyc/Radeon Pro WX/Radeon Instinct sales.
Look at that AMD Project 47 with its 20 Epyc 32 core CPU each time to 4 Radeon MI25(Vega 10 Based) AI/Compute SKUs for 80 total MI25, and you can see that Raja did his job and did it well!
“Raja’s job is not about
“Raja’s job is not about entertaining gamers his job is about producing Vaga as a Compute/AI for the real money maker for AMD that professional Epyc/Radeon Pro WX/Radeon Instinct sales”
Now you’re talking! Just like Lisa Su’s did for sure.
But watch the vid of pcper’s interview with Raja. The bourbon one. Here:
www youtube com/watch?v=24rFeHo1S-o
I am not very versed in this
I am not very versed in this field, but I am holder of AMD stock. I wish the best to Raja Koudri, RTG & AMD. My experience in business, however tells me that there is absolutely no way a person goes on sabbatical and his *boss* takes over temporarily if that department was running great and all hunky dorry. If things are gungho in any department, upper management just lets it run, you never mess with a great thing. If the boss of that department has to go on leave for any reason, they would let his 2nd in command in that department run the show, again for a department that is doing well. Bosses only get in your business if, especially at very prominent levels like this, the CEO, if things are pretty bad. I mean, is it like the CEO does not have enough problems at any company?
Of course being corporate, they never shoot straight with the public, and even internally they make up all sorts of soft landing talk, even amongst themselves in the CXO suite and Board Room. But make no mistake, a SVP going on sabbatical and the CEO taking over that department is as clear a signal as you will ever get, short of direct and immediate resignation.
Knowing the recent story of
Knowing the recent story of how Threadripper came in to be and how Lisa Su doesn’t neglect a good idea, here’s one:
I hope AMD makes an 16 core 32 threads APU on TR4 with 7nm Vega, or even Epyc APUs for a very efficient low cost, low consumption, low TCO, easy deployable HSA computing.
There’s enough space in TR4 for that and they have the modularity and platfotm already.
They are already working in
They are already working in an Interposer based APU for the workstation market so a consumer variant is not out of the question.
Here look at this Research Paper from AMD research partally funded with US government Exascale Research Initative grant money! That’s some APU!
“Design and Analysis of an APU for Exascale Computing”
http://www.computermachines.org/joe/publications/pdfs/hpca2017_exascale_apu.pdf
AMD took a tetrahedron
AMD took a tetrahedron approach on the CCXs displacement making them always only 1 hop away from each other.
This displacement is the most perfect in terms of efficiency, in nature.
And it’s unbeatable.
They can go up to 5 CCXs, if a 3D conceptualization is taken. One more CCX in the center of mass.
Everything at 1 hop. Unbeatable.
From that, go cluster.
As usual no more interesting
As usual no more interesting news
I have little doubt Raja
I have little doubt Raja hasn’t had a real holiday since he started work on Vega and Polaris 2 years ago.
Right now the project is done, delivered and he’s able to take a well deserved break before starting something new.
Kudos.
Kudos.