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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valinor89 - Wednesday, September 13, 2017 - link
On the top of my head I can't remember where AMD overstated the Gaming performance of Vega. They have been quite careful to not give performance numbers until the cards launch. Sure, they may have cherrypicked some test results but I don't see where they lied.Are you not, maybe, confusing AMD provided information with the over hype generated by vega? Most serious analists were expecting the performance we are getting now.
Drumsticks - Wednesday, September 13, 2017 - link
While I don't think it's that extreme, I think there are a number of examples that might fit that.Going back far enough, the "overclocker's dream" nonsense was not exactly a lie, but it was certainly misleading enough to imply anything about the Fury X would lead to an overclocker's dream.
As far as Vega, I don't think there's anything deliberately extremely misleading, but Raja at one point said they believed that Vega met the goal of 4k at 60 fps. I don't think it's readily agreeable that Vega has made that mark.
Lastly, on what metric would analysts expect the performance they're getting now? There's a significant regression in perf/mm^2, no real progress on perf/w (at least on the cards as they ship in stock configurations), and not much of a gain in IPC over Fiji. I'm not sure why any of that would be expected out of a new GPU Architecture.
valinor89 - Thursday, September 14, 2017 - link
Well, I included in serious analysts anyone that wasn't expecting it to beat 1080Ti. Early demos had it at 1080 levels in doom wich is more or less what we are getting on vega 64. It competes with 1080 and 1070. The water cooled one is a joke of a product.Friendly0Fire - Saturday, September 16, 2017 - link
I disagree with that assessment. Nvidia makes a lot of money in the consumer/gaming segment. The real reason AMD can't turn a good profit in gaming is just that their uarch is inefficient. It requires more silicon than Nvidia's architecture and they obstinately keep using ultra expensive HBM for their high end consumer parts.That's the difference between being able to turn a tidy profit at $499 and barely breaking even.
MrSpadge - Wednesday, September 13, 2017 - link
"looks really nice" is very subjective, based on your expectation. It's not a lie to have low expectations.vladx - Wednesday, September 13, 2017 - link
Reading Raja's letter, I'd say it's pretty clear he's been forced out as RTG's face, he'll probably return from his "sabbatical" as a senior chip designer only.Sttm - Wednesday, September 13, 2017 - link
So he is taking a 2 and half month vacation. What amazing news!shabby - Wednesday, September 13, 2017 - link
I'm taking a 2 week vacation on xmas, write about me!webdoctors - Thursday, September 14, 2017 - link
I'm taking a x-mas vacation too! But not sure where, may just stay home and chill.YazX_ - Wednesday, September 13, 2017 - link
people saying that vega is a flop and he got fired, well you are looking into from just gaming perspective, for companies, its about money and targets, their target is to get X revenue from this, Y revenue from that and so on. currently polaris and vega are selling like hot cake and their are a massive shortage in the market, AMD doesnt give a damn about if its miners or gamers, as long as they are selling them and getting profit then thats great news and Raja met his targets and beyond, thus it makes him the perfect man for the job.