AMD Reorganizes Graphics Division - Radeon Whole Once More, Led By Raja Koduri
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It was a bit over nine years ago when AMD announced that they would acquire ATI, the Canadian graphics firm, developer of Radeon GPUs, and constant competitor to NVIDIA. In acquiring ATI, AMD set forth on a massive plan that forever changed how AMD went about building CPUs. The CPU alone would soon no longer be enough; CPUs would need to become something closer to SoCs, integrating I/O, graphics, and more. In AMD’s eyes the future would be fusion, and it would be ATI who would the missing pieces that would in time make AMD’s future whole.
By and large AMD achieved their technical goals with the ATI acquisition.
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None of this could have happened for AMD without the ATI acquisition, and while AMD paid a high price at the time for the technology, in the long run it’s very likely that the fusion of AMD and ATI is what has kept the modern AMD an important player in the current marketplace.
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The end result is that after 9 years there is a reluctant admittance within AMD that such a deep fusion of the businesses has not worked out like AMD expected. GPUs are still essential to AMD’s technology plans and the technology fusion is critical to how AMD operates, but how those products are developed and marketed within AMD needs to change. Consequently AMD has decided to take a step back and to reevaluate how they want to organize their graphics business. And the outcome of that evaluation is that the graphics business will once again become whole, with AMD in a sense turning back the clock and keeping graphics as its own unit.
Leading this new group is AMD veteran Raja Koduri.
