Who can lead the Radeon Technology Group (RTG)?

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_mockingbird

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Coming off what could be possibly the worst launch in the history of Radeon Technology Group (RTG)...

Who can lead the Radeon Technology Group (RTG)?
 
AMD destroyed ATi by allocating apparently all it's engineering design resources to their CPUs and left ATi with roughly the same basic GPU architecture for the past ~6 years.

This kind of thing is what AMD has always done. It's foolish to think something as cosmetic as "Who Leads The Radeon Technology Group" at any particular point in time is going to change the basic facts on the ground.

We're talking about a company that almost always squanders every single advantage it has ever had.

I don't think you would like a deep dive of the company that is AMD and their history with this kind of thing, as it is not pretty.
 
A CPU company will always destroy the GPU part. Because the CPU always comes first.

Any graphics maker merging with Intel or AMD will always end up an IGP option only in the long run.

So for any kind of possible success you want it to be disjoined and the appropriate R&D allocated. In terms of R&D, RTG needs all AMDs R&D just to have a chance.
 
Communism said:
AMD destroyed ATi by allocating apparently all it's engineering design resources to their CPUs and left ATi with roughly the same basic GPU architecture for the past ~6 years.

This kind of thing is what AMD has always done. It's foolish to think something as cosmetic as "Who Leads The Radeon Technology Group" at any particular point in time is going to change the basic facts on the ground.

We're talking about a company that almost always squanders every single advantage it has ever had.

I don't think you would like a deep dive of the company that is AMD and their history with this kind of thing, as it is not pretty.
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WTF are you on about? The big advantage they had before was not squandered it was illegally squashed by Intel.
 
I am waiting to see the real crown jewel in what will AMD pair with a say Ryzen 3 1300X to make an APU with.. maybe RX 570 gpu as it's going to make us rethink how much do we really need to spend for DX 12 gaming.
 
jologskyblues said:
JHH?





I kid, I kid. :)
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I was honestly going to answer this, lol. But even he may be overwhelmed with the structure of AMD itself.


Shintai said:
A CPU company will always destroy the GPU part. Because the CPU always comes first.

Any graphics maker merging with Intel or AMD will always end up an IGP option only in the long run.

So for any kind of possible success you want it to be disjoined and the appropriate R&D allocated. In terms of R&D, RTG needs all AMDs R&D just to have a chance.
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I think it depends on which company came into the relationship on top. If Nvidia bought AMD as JHH originally wanted, it is likely Nvidia would have continued to be the lead partner in the company. That being said, the company had a serious critical refocus of engineering resources after the AMD acquisition failure and after Intel decided to stop allowing 3rd party chipsets. Without winding down its chipset division, it is possible Nvidia of today could have been less competitive than Nvidia/AMD. Then again, maybe Nvidia would not have used a lot of resources pursuing the Denver architecture, only to turn around and found with IBM the OpenPOWER alliance and its CPU-GPU interconnect.
 
PA PA NA PAAAAAAAA

john-cena-3.jpg
 
Communism said:
AMD destroyed ATi by allocating apparently all it's engineering design resources to their CPUs and left ATi with roughly the same basic GPU architecture for the past ~6 years.

This kind of thing is what AMD has always done. It's foolish to think something as cosmetic as "Who Leads The Radeon Technology Group" at any particular point in time is going to change the basic facts on the ground.

We're talking about a company that almost always squanders every single advantage it has ever had.

I don't think you would like a deep dive of the company that is AMD and their history with this kind of thing, as it is not pretty.
Click to expand...


Well there is a secondary notion to this, because they haven't invested much in R&D in the past 4 generations after creating GCN, they could pile up R&D for their true next generation architecture. So gotta wait for Navi and see what it has in store. Having said that its still a tough thing to do.

We can kinda think of this the same way they did Zen but nV is not sitting still with their GPU's unlike what Intel did.
 
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I might be wrong but I'm guessing that AMD designed GCN as a long-term architecture with the intent that they wanted to maintain some level of commonality with the consoles after their design wins because maybe, they thought that would be an advantage for them in the long run but things didn't quite pan out the way they wanted to.
 
Having consoles really only helps in the PC market if they were able to maintain PC marketshare, without that all the optimizations for consoles just don't pan out for more than a generation for PC's. Its always been that way.
 
razor1 said:
Having consoles really only helps in the PC market if they were able to maintain PC marketshare, without that all the optimizations for consoles just don't pan out for more than a generation for PC's. Its always been that way.
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I noticed that. Only Hawaii seems gotten the most optimization as it shares the same GCN 1.1 revision with GPUs used in the PS4 and XB1. As for Polaris being used on the PS4 Pro and Scorpio, it remains to be seen if the optimizations will carry over to the RX 400/500 series.
 
KazeoHin said:
I'm giving him until Navi. Polaris was a bit boring, Vega was a complete trash fire: if Navi is a shit show, I'll be more than happy to grab a pitchfork and run him out.
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Navi is really just Vega on a "7nm" node. Not going to be much different, its mainly cost focused.
 
KazeoHin said:
I'm giving him until Navi. Polaris was a bit boring, Vega was a complete trash fire: if Navi is a shit show, I'll be more than happy to grab a pitchfork and run him out.
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Don't forget about our #waitforNavi thread.

https://hardforum.com/threads/navi-rumors.1941143/

Raja's "true baby" and Vega wasn't really his... but the post above mine said it's nothing special... so YMMV
 
featured_single.jpg


I was only 30 years old.
I loved AMD so much.
My entire PC was AMD branded.
Every night I prayed to AMD,
thanking them for providing affordable PC components.
"Radeon is Love" I say, "Radeon is Life".
My dad hears me and calls me an AMD Fanboi shill.
I knew he was jealous of my PC's price to performance ratio.
I call him an Nvidiot.
He slaps me and sends me to bed.
I'm crying now and my PC crashed.
I feel a warmth approach me...
It's Raja Koduri!
I'm so happy.
He whispers to me "2.5x performance per watt"
He turns over my PC and pulls out a screwdriver...
I'm ready
I open my PC for Raja
He pulls out a brand new Radeon® RX Vega 64™ video card.
It was barely faster than a 12 month old card that used half the power, but I do it for Raja.
I feel my mainboard overheat as Raj draws too many watts over the PCI-E lanes.
Raj lets out a mighty roar as he updates my drivers
My dad walks in
Raja Koduri looks him straight in the eye and says
"The biggest advancement in GPU architecture since GCN*"
Raj leaves through my window.
Radeon is love. Radeon is life​
 
KazeoHin said:
featured_single.jpg


I was only 30 years old.
I loved AMD so much.
My entire PC was AMD branded.
Every night I prayed to AMD,
thanking them for providing affordable PC components.
"Radeon is Love" I say, "Radeon is Life".
My dad hears me and calls me an AMD Fanboi shill.
I knew he was jealous of my PC's price to performance ratio.
I call him an Nvidiot.
He slaps me and sends me to bed.
I'm crying now and my PC crashed.
I feel a warmth approach me...
It's Raja Koduri!
I'm so happy.
He whispers to me "2.5x performance per watt"
He turns over my PC and pulls out a screwdriver...
I'm ready
I open my PC for Raja
He pulls out a brand new Radeon® RX Vega 64™ video card.
It was barely faster than a 12 month old card that used half the power, but I do it for Raja.
I feel my mainboard overheat as Raj draws too many watts over the PCI-E lanes.
Raj lets out a mighty roar as he updates my drivers
My dad walks in
Raja Koduri looks him straight in the eye and says
"The biggest advancement in GPU architecture since GCN*"
Raj leaves through my window.
Radeon is love. Radeon is life​
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Rofl, this is gold.
 
Fanboy concentration is high, commence the napalm blanket bombing.

Like every corporation where product delivery is essential, non performance of mandate is normally met with replacements. This is not very surprising or concerning, in fact Raja had 3 odd years and didn't deliver a proper all round solid product, now AMD may have decided that instead of letting RTG massacre itself costing the parent company money, cut the cancer out at the now autonomous RTG and replace them with people that may deliver.

#Mindblow
 
OrangeKhrush said:
Fanboy concentration is high, commence the napalm blanket bombing.

Like every corporation where product delivery is essential, non performance of mandate is normally met with replacements. This is not very surprising or concerning, in fact Raja had 3 odd years and didn't deliver a proper all round solid product, now AMD may have decided that instead of letting RTG massacre itself costing the parent company money, cut the cancer out at the now autonomous RTG and replace them with people that may deliver.

#Mindblow
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I said over a month ago there there is an internal effort to remove him.
 
_mockingbird said:
I said over a month ago there there is an internal effort to remove him.
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Great, probably a lot to do with the fact that AMD knew where the product would land and decided that it was not good enough and now Raja is surplus to requirements, maybe along with a few others as AMD looks to address the situation. Nothing out of the unexpected.
 
Statement from raja

https://www.pcper.com/news/Graphics-Cards/AMD-Radeon-Technologies-Group-Raja-Koduri-Goes-Sabbatical

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
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TaintedSquirrel said:
Statement from raja

https://www.pcper.com/news/Graphics-Cards/AMD-Radeon-Technologies-Group-Raja-Koduri-Goes-Sabbatical
Click to expand...

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.

this seems less like a guy to get fired and more a guy changing his role in the setup
 
I'm guessing Raja did what he could with the resources AMD allocated RTG. He's probably serving as a scapegoat for AMD's failures and will eventually take on a lesser role there or be booted out entirely after December. If Lisa Su is smart, she'll reorient RTG as a mid to low end GPU maker that focuses on APUs, consoles, low/mid range consumer GPU and IP licensing. Forget the high end, they have no hope of touching NVIDIA and it is futile trying to do it.
 
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5150Joker said:
I'm guessing Raja did what he could with the resources AMD allocated RTG. He's probably serving as a scapegoat for AMD's failures and will eventually take on a lesser role there or be booted out entirely after December. If Lisa Su is smart, she'll reorient RTG as a mid to low end GPU maker that focuses on APUs, consoles, low/mid range consumer GPU and IP licensing. Forget the high end, they have no hope of touching NVIDIA and it is futile trying to do it.
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I can see a market for AMD in compute based cards or professional cards, ASIC miners, AI and deep learning, co-processors, APU's and as you mentioned IP licences. And the focus on midlevel and entry level is still good enough especially if you dominate the segment.
 
OrangeKhrush said:
I can see a market for AMD in compute based cards or professional cards, ASIC miners, AI and deep learning, co-processors, APU's and as you mentioned IP licences. And the focus on midlevel and entry level is still good enough especially if you dominate the segment.
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Then AMD need to stop the PR talk and deliver.
We have ONE vendor (out of three vendors) with server on the roadmap with an AMD GPU (1 effing server!)
And the GPU....a FirePro S7100X.

As long as that is the reality....Intel and NVIDIA wil not loose marketshare in enterprise/datacenters to AMD.
 
OrangeKhrush said:
I can see a market for AMD in compute based cards or professional cards, ASIC miners, AI and deep learning, co-processors, APU's and as you mentioned IP licences. And the focus on midlevel and entry level is still good enough especially if you dominate the segment.
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Not asic miners, they don't have the perf/watt to get even close to those. nV's GPU's don't even get close to those, talking about 100 fold difference here in most coins that can be mined with Asics. Professional, nada, no software, they are left with APU and consoles, consoles won't last long unless they get closer to nV in perf/watt, within striking distance. Although their mid range is closer than their performance segment in that category, so right now they are safe.

There really stuck with SOC's and semicustom designs right now.
 
Well, I will tell you what is going to happen.

Over the next couple of months, RTG is going to go through a major restructuring.

Although it has not been decided:

Koduri's position as head of RTG is on life support.

Koduri may return to wind-down his work on Navi.

Navi will likely be the last GCN architecture.

RTG is considering a new non-GCN architecture.

This will be lead by a new chief engineer.

_________________________________________________________________

The situation is very much in flux, so don't take this as gospel.
 
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I've never been a fan of AMD but I truly hope they continue to push Intel and Nvidia. Competition is good. The last thing we need is them to abandon the enthusiast market.
 
razor1 said:
Not asic miners, they don't have the perf/watt to get even close to those. nV's GPU's don't even get close to those, talking about 100 fold difference here in most coins that can be mined with Asics. Professional, nada, no software, they are left with APU and consoles, consoles won't last long unless they get closer to nV in perf/watt, within striking distance. Although their mid range is closer than their performance segment in that category, so right now they are safe.

There really stuck with SOC's and semicustom designs right now.
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Lisa Su was probably told, don't make server class CPU's no eco system, just make APU's and custom silicon, much like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were told to make client based products. You never get beyond point A without venturing to point B. Can AMD make professional cards, yes they already do they can just strip hybrid parts intended for gaming and focus more on raw computational performance and there are plenty markets for that. Graphics Rendering, CGI is at an all time boom.

The good thing about Lisa Su is she strikes me more as the person that pays heed to limits. She is extremely driven by challenges and I am sure she will push for that to be achieved. If you don't make things happen they never will.
 
They can go the HTC route, and sell RTG to someone who actually cares.

Who knows, maybe someone like Samsung/Apple is interested, maybe even Qualcomm.
 
OrangeKhrush said:
Lisa Su was probably told, don't make server class CPU's no eco system, just make APU's and custom silicon, much like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were told to make client based products. You never get beyond point A without venturing to point B. Can AMD make professional cards, yes they already do they can just strip hybrid parts intended for gaming and focus more on raw computational performance and there are plenty markets for that. Graphics Rendering, CGI is at an all time boom.

The good thing about Lisa Su is she strikes me more as the person that pays heed to limits. She is extremely driven by challenges and I am sure she will push for that to be achieved. If you don't make things happen they never will.
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Its about money, where is she going to get the R&D money to do all these things, its gotta come from somewhere, and if they do it now, its going to cut into their CPU R&D and that will be dangerous for them. Very soon they need to start thinking and designing the uarch coming after Zen, which will cost quite a bit of money.

PS its not just hardware its software too, there is boom for AMD if they can't get software ready too! And software development costs money too. This is the main reason why nV kicks Intel's ass in HPC accelerators (let alone AMD) nV has the entire package, neither AMD or Intel have that.
 
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Where did AMD get all the R&D money for EPYC? They just had to innovate and find a different path away from big dies. Navi looks to be a similar path but due to Vega power requirements may not be enough is my first thoughts. Probably hinges more on 7nm being ready and yielding good more than anything else. Frankly I think Raja did do good with what was given to him and definitely a rough ride. Also he had to come up with one chip that had to do it all on the high end which is probably wishful thinking in the end.

Not sure what to think of a three month off period for Raja, so I won't, my guessing would probably be wrong.
 
noko said:
Where did AMD get all the R&D money for EPYC? They just had to innovate and find a different path away from big dies. Navi looks to be a similar path but due to Vega power requirements may not be enough is my first thoughts. Probably hinges more on 7nm being ready and yielding good more than anything else. Frankly I think Raja did do good with what was given to him and definitely a rough ride. Also he had to come up with one chip that had to do it all on the high end which is probably wishful thinking in the end.

Not sure what to think of a three month off period for Raja, so I won't, my guessing would probably be wrong.
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EYPC is Zen just more cores, no need for "extra" R&D for that. The processor after Zen 3 though, that is a new processor.

Navi will not be that, graphics programming needs to change before AMD or nV start making multi die chips. Navi will be scaleble like Maxwell was scalable, they were able to make a complete line of chips HPC to pro graphics, to gaming, by removing parts easily.

I know Anarchist thinks it doesn't (as everything is easy) but there needs to be fundimental changes, both on uarch and programming techniques before we see multi die being used in GPU's.
 
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