Raja Leaves Radeon Technologies Group for Now

When I worked for a large software company with stupid deadlines, my team worked several 80-90 hour weeks for 2 months straight (only had to work a half day for Christmas one year!). I barely saw my wife during that time. My current job - I was doing some of this when I had babies at home. It sucked. I didn't get much extra in the way of compensation and no time off for it (well, I think we got to leave an hour early one day...)
However, that was my job and I did it. Water under the bridge. My boss at my one place worked more hours than that. The dude was killing himself. After the 80-90, he would go home and work more hours. I reach a wall (especially when I was programming) in which nothing useful is happening. I think he was going mental - he pushed so hard and just got the big D in the end.
Our reward? The company closed our office in the midwest and laid off the 60 or so remaining developers. I think some were given a chance to apply at a different office. Fuck that.
I hope the guy recoups. Companies can drain your life - you don't get the time back and often times, don't get anything except an empty life in return. Somewhere I have a wood plaque that was given to me for 10 years service. Since I don't know where the plaque is, you can tell how meaningful it is to me.
My current philosophy - I still work hard and give the job my best. However, you aren't going to see many more 80's from me. Maybe on the rare occasion it is required. I'm more of a 40-45 hour a week guy now.
 
auntjemima said:
Canadian Military.

I also get March break.
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purefun65 said:
He failed and he needs to go. AMD needs a better leader at the GPU division.
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That is so damn stupid.

Polaris and Vega were the last of the Arctic Islands architecture that was developed BEFORE Raja got there. They were rebranded and sold, but nonetheless, the millions in R&D $ had already been spent and especially if you read Kyle's editoral on AMD about a year ago or so, the design was terrible. The previous engineers screwed the pooch.

So Raja had to make chicken salad from chicken shit, and they ended up selling out to recoup costs - this is the REAL reason why AMD doesn't give a crap if the cards right now all go to digital currency miners. They just want to recoup costs.

Navi will be the very first design entirely conceived by Raja. He even said when he came back in 2018, he will be focusing on architecture and design. That's because what they design now is entirely on Raja's shoulders as the lead, much as Keller was the lead for Ryzen.


To me, the break now makes total sense. They are finally out from under the burden of the previously poorly engineered design. The future of the RTG is ENTIRELY on Raja's shoulders now as all focus is now on developing Navi.

So sure, take time off, spend time with the family, recharge, re-engergize, and come into 2018 ready to decide the future of the RTG, as just as a poor engineering design put AMD in this position in the graphics market, so too will Raja's decisions be deciding the RTGs fate for the next 5-7 years, even if he fails, as his successor would then have to get out from under his designs and the millions spent in R&D for them, much like Raja had to get out from under the bad Arctic Islands architecture to get to Navi - and frankly, AMD wasn't in a position to take a loss on R&D which is why they had to do what they did with Vega and Polaris.

Raja had proven he has some amazing business sense in how they were able to market and sell Polaris and Vega despite being inferior cards. Now its all on him going forward for good or bad. Smart move deciding to recharge.
 
The issue here is not whether the cards are selling, it's Whether AMD are making any money from them. Yeah, sure, the cards are flying off the shelves because of miners, but how much money is AMD actually making? Maybe the company isn't happy with the profits margins of Raja's leadership.
 
KazeoHin said:
The issue here is not whether the cards are selling, it's Whether AMD are making any money from them. Yeah, sure, the cards are flying off the shelves because of miners, but how much money is AMD actually making? Maybe the company isn't happy with the profits margins of Raja's leadership.
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I think context matters. Raja was hired to replace the person/people who created the Arctic Islands. If AMD knew this going in, then it is entirely possible that the entire goal was to tread water with some poorly designed chips until Raja can do what he was hired to do - design the next wave with hopefully better engineering.

The thing you have to keep in mind is AMD is not intel - they could not have simply absorbed the failure of of the Arctic islands and ate all that money that was invested into it - they were cash-strapped when Raja was brought on, and needed to make that money back - therefore it makes sense if the strategy up until this point was to tread water, because they internally knew what a shitshow Arctic Islands was, which jibes with Kyle's AMD editoral.
 
Anarchist4000 said:
If you glance at AMDs job postings, there are many director and senior manager positions posted for positions that don't currently exist. RTG appears to be undergoing a significant expansion now that financials are in order.

What's likely going to occur is Lisa steps in to better understand the business and eventually hires on an executive vice president of RTG in the process of reorganizing and expanding. Raja then comes back in charge of operations/development and someone new handles the administrative side. It's not really a demotion, but would likely place a new decision maker above him. There may be more SVPs showing up or some form of integration with the CPU side.
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I agree with you that this may be one possible outcome and even a likely one. However, am not sure if I agree that it's not really a demotion. If I used to be in charge of a whole division but then stopped being in charge of the whole thing and had a new boss to report to (i.e. a "new decision maker above him" as you state), I would consider myself demoted even if my title didn't change.
 
vegeta535 said:
Not a 3 month vacation. If I asked for 3 months just to hang out on a beach my company will tell me go pound sand. He need to get the GPU department in gear and produce something worth a fuck.
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Raja earned that vacation. You get there, You pilot a GPU line back from the brink of destruction and then you can talk shit about whether they earned it or not.
 
GreenOrbs said:
I agree with you that this may be one possible outcome and even a likely one. However, am not sure if I agree that it's not really a demotion. If I used to be in charge of a whole division but then stopped being in charge of the whole thing and had a new boss to report to (i.e. a "new decision maker above him" as you state), I would consider myself demoted even if my title didn't change.
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Likely the same title and pay, only difference being part of the responsibilities shifting. Executive VPs, if AMD goes that route, tend to take precedence. If I were overworked and the part if the job I disliked shifted to someone else I wouldn't care. Really depends how it's structured, but the duties were likely expanding and something had to give. Raja's current title was SVP and Chief Architect. SVP Graphics Development and someone else SVP RTG Operations makes sense. The job simply outgrew one person.
 
lol here i thought AMD finally decides to let go Raja for being intel mole that work hard to separate RTG from AMD so intel can acquire RTG for themselves......
 
KazeoHin said:
The issue here is not whether the cards are selling, it's Whether AMD are making any money from them. Yeah, sure, the cards are flying off the shelves because of miners, but how much money is AMD actually making? Maybe the company isn't happy with the profits margins of Raja's leadership.
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Very little at best, losing money at worst. The entire strategy of RTG is plain wrong. And this is not only the fault of Raja, but the board as well.

Both Polaris and Vega is outright a worse disaster for mobile than they ever was for desktop. And mobile is the key for volume today. Gaming laptops for example are dominant in sales over desktop now.

Raven Ridge GPU performance and power consumption metrics for mobile is so lack buster it gets beaten by Intel IGP at a factor of 2x.

The true nextgen consoles seems completely lost. At this point the advantage for Nvidia is so great its unavoidable. Or the company sticking to AMD will plain outright lose.

HPC/AI there is absolutely nothing for AMD and they are beaten by a factor of 5 in some cases. Yet it's the top focus. And gaming is still at 2x or more revenue than HPC/AI. (Nvidia Q2 2018 1186M gaming, 416M HPC/AI)

At the current level of sales for gaming PCs, AMD seems to sit at around 5-7% share with a downward trend.

And from a cost perspective, there is a reason why the "MSRP" for Vega needs a direct discount from AMD. Else someone else needs to take the loss. The cost structure is another disaster for RTG, not only for Vega.
 
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I commend people like this for taking time off. It means they are still human.
 
viscountalpha said:
Raja earned that vacation. You get there, You pilot a GPU line back from the brink of destruction and then you can talk shit about whether they earned it or not.
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RTG is in a worse shape today than they ever was. At this point the question is what is their future if any, because it cant continue as it is now. And Raja gets first blame for it for now. All the false claims and lies instead of products that could deliver didn´t help either.
 
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Pretty rough comments here on Raja.
2 things.. if he is coming back we with less responsibilities for equal money, he is being PROMOTED. Another already mentioned we don't know what's coming.. seems its coming early 2018 but that will Rajas more than vega 10... Plus i don't see what's to get too negative about current vega, its a decent card with good performance. Sure sure is not blowing Nvidia out the water, i know.
 
Trimlock said:
I commend people like this for taking time off. It means they are still human.
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Seriously, how many people are in a position to take months off work, and still have a job to go back to afterwards? Your living in cloud cuckoo land mate.
 
Boy, people just don't want to listen.

RTG was forced to tread water buy horrible engineering decisions in wasted money poured into the Arctic Islands technology. All that predated Raja.

If you look at AMD around the time this would have begun development, they were still suffering and reeling from the bulldozer Fiasco, and were in such Financial Dire Straits people were wondering if the company as a whole would end up an acquisition for companies like Samsung or Microsoft.

And yet some morons here are pissed off that they didn't scrap everything and start over when Raja got there? They financially couldn't! They didn't have a damn funds to do it! So people need to stop acting like they were jumping and skipping merrily on their way down this path of selling off Vega and Polaris when they needed to do this just to make the money back.

Sure, it sucks, but as a business they had no damn choice. They needed to make that research and development money back so that they could move forward. This wasn't a strategic business decision in so much at was about survival, and they did what they had to do in order to survive long enough to be able to get out from under that poorly designed architecture.

They achieved that, and now Raja is going on a sabbatical that I think is well deserved given the shit he must have had to deal with.

Keep in mind, none of this is saying Raja will end up being the RTG savior.

Navis architecture could be a shitstain too - the difference is that it will finally be raja's shitstain.

As much as some are trying to rush to judgement (and I do suspect they likely are nvidia fans if I had to guess), the facts are the facts, and the fact is the Arctic Islands architecture was designed already before Raja koduri got there.

Anything that does not take that into account, be it by ignoring it or by trying to counter with a prime example of cognitive dissonance by saying "yeah, but" simply is not dealing with reality but rather their own internal script they wish to be true.

Everything that came before doesn't matter at this point. And everything Navi & Beyond will rightfully fall at the feet of Raja, for good or ill. Anyone who thinks anything else frankly is just kidding themselves.
 
Zion Halcyon said:
Boy, people just don't want to listen. [...]

As much as some are trying to rush to judgement (and I do suspect they likely are nvidia fans if I had to guess), the facts are the facts, and the fact is the Arctic Islands architecture was designed already before Raja koduri got there.

Anything that does not take that into account, be it by ignoring it or by trying to counter with a prime example of cognitive dissonance by saying "yeah, but" simply is not dealing with reality but rather their own internal script they wish to be true.
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You nailed it. He was fighting a battle on two fronts. You have to do the best you can with decisions made years ago while planning ahead years in the future.
 
Stimpy88 said:
Seriously, how many people are in a position to take months off work, and still have a job to go back to afterwards? Your living in cloud cuckoo land mate.
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Well, at this point they invested so much in him that they can get away with him taking time off only to harness all that recouped energy when he gets back.
 
Shintai said:
RTG is in a worse shape today than they ever was.
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Their products are so bad that Intel is licensing them...

I mean, sure, Intel played down the news as a bunch of nothing but is Intel's graphics division even active anymore? Must be pretty embarrassing to be behind AMD across the board.
 
Stimpy88 said:
Seriously, how many people are in a position to take months off work, and still have a job to go back to afterwards? Your living in cloud cuckoo land mate.
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There are 2 types of people right now in this thread: people who have actually worked in large corporate tech firms with a decent culture and with hard to replace, passionate people at the helm.... and people who probably have worked in easily replaceable IT jobs.
 
trick_m0nkey said:
There are 2 types of people right now in this thread: people who have actually worked in large corporate tech firms with a decent culture and with hard to replace, passionate people at the helm.... and people who probably have worked in easily replaceable IT jobs.
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That could be true, but for me I'm going to say let's wait and see if Raja comes back. It could go either way in my opinion. This is AMD we are talking about.
 
DooKey said:
That could be true, but for me I'm going to say let's wait and see if Raja comes back. It could go either way in my opinion. This is AMD we are talking about.
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I would be shocked if he doesn't. To put this in terms of sports, that would be like hiring a GM to do a complete rebuild of your NFL football team, allowing him to cut the dead weight when free agency opens up, but not allowing him to sign any new players and firing him before the Draft starts.

People need to see the big picture. Raja is finally at the true starting line where he can be in charge of the design of a brand new card and technology which is what he was hired for.

Up until this point, all he could do was dress up the failure of the previous design team and try to make as much money back as possible to keep the graphics division of AMD solvent.

That monkey is finally off his back and now he is free to do exactly what he was hired to do - and people think he's going to be fired or quit? That's almost laughable.

He said himself that he is coming back with a focus on architecture. That was what he was hired for. He finally gets to have his design and not have to peddle someone else's.

In light of that, and in light of the demands it will have on him and his family, as well as the importance of it and the stress that comes with it, a sabbatical here makes all the sense in the world because when he gets back in 2018 it is go time and now shit gets real and he knows it.

If any of you read Kyle's AMD editorial then you would know AMD knew they had the shit bucket on their hands for architecture with the Arctic Islands, and if they knew that, no way in hell would they blame Raja for the design when he wasn't the one who designed it! He was hired to take AMD forward. Now he finally gets to do so.

Whether it ends up a success or a failure is entirely on his shoulders now and I know he knows it which is probably the other reason for the sabbatical in the first place, to make sure he has his mind right and is refreshed going into this because at this point when he comes back he is literally engineering his legacy, for good or ill.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
Their products are so bad that Intel is licensing them...

I mean, sure, Intel played down the news as a bunch of nothing but is Intel's graphics division even active anymore? Must be pretty embarrassing to be behind AMD across the board.
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That still isn't confirmed.
 
SighTurtle said:
That still isn't confirmed.
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The licensing deal switch from Nvidia to AMD did happen. Intel has downplayed the possibility of it leading to AMD graphics in Intel products, but Intel also seems to have substantially reduced or killed off their own graphics division during the April workforce reduction.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
The licensing deal switch from Nvidia to AMD did happen. Intel has downplayed the possibility of it leading to AMD graphics in Intel products, but Intel also seems to have substantially reduced or killed off their own graphics division during the April workforce reduction.
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I can't find anything that speaks to that.. only the rumor squashing news actually.
 
You know, it's been over a year and a half since Kyle gave us this great editorial:

https://m.hardocp.com/article/2016/05/27/from_ati_to_amd_back_journey_in_futility

Given that Raja is now on sabbatical, I am very curious if he has a follow-up?

It was a pretty bleak picture that was painted at that time for AMD. I'm interested to know what the people Kyle speaks with are telling him regarding the future, in particular the RTG group, and where they think they are going from here?

Does Raja still want to split off from AMD? Does the success of Ryzen change the calculus? Where does the RTG group go from here now that they are out from under the Arctic Islands architecture?

As koduri is on sabbatical it actually is a great time to stop and reflect with where AMD is now, and the mood of the people who work there.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
The licensing deal switch from Nvidia to AMD did happen. Intel has downplayed the possibility of it leading to AMD graphics in Intel products, but Intel also seems to have substantially reduced or killed off their own graphics division during the April workforce reduction.
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That was debunked. The licensing deal with Nvidia and Intel remains in force for basically forever.
 
vegeta535 said:
Nope. It is less likely that some one more valuable then me will get to take 3 months off unless it is for medical reasons. It hard enough to get a month off in a row using all my vacation time.
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Once you get above a certain position, rules dont really apply any longer.


At my last company, the CFO was leaving for a better position at a different company. He still got pay, health insurance and even got to keep his company leased BMW 7 series for 6 months after leaving.
 
Zion Halcyon said:
He said himself that he is coming back with a focus on architecture. That was what he was hired for. He finally gets to have his design and not have to peddle someone else's.
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Little late to start his design. That should have begun in his first year. If he comes back and starts, we're looking at a good three years before it arrives.

Vega at the very least required a rewrite of the software stack. Considering the effort involved AMD wouldn't do that if the "new" architecture of Vega wouldn't be carried forward. Proper binning to remove unnecessary work and a register file cache are all that GCN really needed to compete with Nvidia. That's without accounting for other superior features. One of those should be there, the other there is little information provided and no requirement to utilize.
 
Zion Halcyon said:
I think context matters. Raja was hired to replace the person/people who created the Arctic Islands. If AMD knew this going in, then it is entirely possible that the entire goal was to tread water with some poorly designed chips until Raja can do what he was hired to do - design the next wave with hopefully better engineering.

The thing you have to keep in mind is AMD is not intel - they could not have simply absorbed the failure of of the Arctic islands and ate all that money that was invested into it - they were cash-strapped when Raja was brought on, and needed to make that money back - therefore it makes sense if the strategy up until this point was to tread water, because they internally knew what a shitshow Arctic Islands was, which jibes with Kyle's AMD editoral.
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AMD also had to produce something for their partners to market otherwise they may not wait around for Navi and that would put AMD in hard spot as well.
 
Anarchist4000 said:
Little late to start his design. That should have begun in his first year. If he comes back and starts, we're looking at a good three years before it arrives.

Vega at the very least required a rewrite of the software stack. Considering the effort involved AMD wouldn't do that if the "new" architecture of Vega wouldn't be carried forward. Proper binning to remove unnecessary work and a register file cache are all that GCN really needed to compete with Nvidia. That's without accounting for other superior features. One of those should be there, the other there is little information provided and no requirement to utilize.
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I don't think he's starting the design. I believe that is already well underway, and I think a lot of the Technologies used in Vega will be carried over and refined. I wouldn't be surprised if they use the Vega as a test bed for what they wanted to put into Navi.

At the heart it still was Greenland but given where they wanted Polaris to be and where it ended up, the fact that they could get Greenland to at least be almost competitive with a 1080 made bode well for Navi if the corner of Navi is Far and Away Superior to that of Greenland.
 
While I assume its a good bet that Raja has his vision for charting AMD's GPU division, I don't know if subscribing to Navi or etc being "his design" is the right way to look at this. I'm sure Raja has his ideas for the future, and he has been at AMD for quite a bit at this point, theres a good bit of barriers that probably have meant the GPU division hasnt been able to do whatever it wants. Evidently, organizational barriers, AMD scraping back, etc, have meant that AMD was forced to rely on GCN for what it seems now, to be too long. Subscribing to Navi being the new one seems foolish in light of these problems. Anyway, assuming Raja isn't jumping or isnt getting pushed out, it sounds more like either Raja isn't up to, or prefers to not longer deal with certain responsibilities that comes along with being head of RTG in its current structure. Not sure how exactly this will look, I think most likely he cedes responsibility of things like marketing, sales, and retains overall control of hardware and software like he was before RTG.
 
SighTurtle said:
While I assume its a good bet that Raja has his vision for charting AMD's GPU division, I don't know if subscribing to Navi or etc being "his design" is the right way to look at this. I'm sure Raja has his ideas for the future, and he has been at AMD for quite a bit at this point, theres a good bit of barriers that probably have meant the GPU division hasnt been able to do whatever it wants. Evidently, organizational barriers, AMD scraping back, etc, have meant that AMD was forced to rely on GCN for what it seems now, to be too long. Subscribing to Navi being the new one seems foolish in light of these problems. Anyway, assuming Raja isn't jumping or isnt getting pushed out, it sounds more like either Raja isn't up to, or prefers to not longer deal with certain responsibilities that comes along with being head of RTG in its current structure. Not sure how exactly this will look, I think most likely he cedes responsibility of things like marketing, sales, and retains overall control of hardware and software like he was before RTG.
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Replace Raja and RTG with Jim Keller and Zen. Do you think under those circumstances what you are saying still holds water?

Keller is the father of Zen. Much of the engineering staff in AMD is the same ones that designed bulldozer. However it was under Keller's strategic leadership and smart design that Zen came about.

That is the position Raja now finds himself in. He is the Jim Keller for that group.
 
Zion Halcyon said:
Replace Raja and RTG with Jim Keller and Zen. Do you think under those circumstances what you are saying still holds water?

Keller is the father of Zen. Much of the engineering staff in AMD is the same ones that designed bulldozer. However it was under Keller's strategic leadership and smart design that Zen came about.

That is the position Raja now finds himself in. He is the Jim Keller for that group.
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You credit people way too much than they deserve. And that's written as a huge understatement.
 
Raja's culture is different and family is probably extremely important to him. I have a friend that was born with the same culture Raja has and his family is extremely important, more important than anything else. If he was working 70 hour weeks, this does make sense. We will see when he returns.
 
Shintai said:
You credit people way too much than they deserve. And that's written as a huge understatement.
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Say what you will. But at least there is a logic behind my statements rather than a gross generalization of yours with no substantial proof backing what you are saying.

Are you arguing that Jim Keller, who AMD credited with architecting Zen and who they hired to design Zen is somehow not the person responsible for AMD having Zen?

If the engineers AMD had on staff were such a great Architects then why bulldozer? And why did AMD feel the need to reach out to Jim in order to design Zen?

With regards to the similarities to koduri, and discarding any straw man arguments that assume I am proclaiming greatness from Raja when I am not but merely commenting on the similar roles they have within their own divisions, the only thing I have said is that the Arctic Islands predates Raja joining AMD, which it does. Therefore only an idiot would hold him accountable for something that was in place before he got there.

With regards to what changes he could have made it to the architecture, I already explained that Millions at that point had already been invested in the research and development of the Arctic Islands line. If you read Kyle's take on AMD about a year-and-a-half ago, it points out the frustration the RTG Engineers had with said engineering design and predicted the issues with it.

Given that Polaris was originally supposed to be something that would compete with Nvidia, that came true. We had some delays with Vega and ultimately got something that falls just a hair below nvidia's TI 1080.

What this would tell any sane person is that Polaris which came before Vega ( both of which are Arctic Island rebrands), was too far along for any significant changes to be made and therefore they had to slash prices to sell them and try to recoup some of the research and development costs.

Knowing Polaris's limitations, the fact that koduri could take that architecture and get it within spitting distance of a 1080 actually speaks well to him and his team. It also speaks well to his own influence over the team as much of that team was there for the design of the Arctic Islands line, and were they competent enough to do it all on their own, then why wasn't Polaris faster?

This is what people call logic. It is used for smart people. Dumb people make General statements about what smart people deduce because they can't comprehend or refute smart people's statements.

Therefore if you want to make a general statement and pass it off like you are some sort of authority, you basically fail at convincing anyone of your statement.

If you want to prove that you are right then put forth some sort of logical rebuttal. And by logical, it means you have to actually consider the details I am putting forth instead of ignoring them to suit your own argumentative needs.

You will have to do better then essentially just saying "nuh uh!"

Else consider the other likely possibility:

Your opinion could be wrong.

I welcome any debate or even enlightenment you think you can provide to this topic. If you think I am wrong, give me some hard concrete non emotional rational explanations as to why. Give me a good enough argument and I am mentally flexible enough to change my opinion.

I doubt the same could be said of you.
 
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