Raja on 'sabbatical', Lisa Su to head up RTG in the meantime.

[Elixer]

File this under odd timing.

Radeon lead @GFXChipTweeter is taking sabbatical until Dec. @LisaSu taking over RTG lead in meantime.

https://mobile.twitter.com/ryanshrout/status/907812489672392704

They still have more Vega products in the pipeline, and maybe Raja was just bummed / stressed out, or perhaps he wants to make a movie?

*edit: This explains a bit more:

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

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

 

[Arachnotronic]

File this under odd timing.


https://mobile.twitter.com/ryanshrout/status/907812489672392704

They still have more Vega products in the pipeline, and maybe Raja was just bummed / stressed out, or perhaps he wants to make a movie?

Yeah, pretty obvious how this story ends. Will be interesting to see who takes over RTG.

 

[ViRGE]

File this under odd timing.


https://mobile.twitter.com/ryanshrout/status/907812489672392704

They still have more Vega products in the pipeline, and maybe Raja was just bummed / stressed out, or perhaps he wants to make a movie?

It's odd timing, that's for sure. If this were planned well in advanced (like Intel's required sabbaticals), it would have been telegraphed as such. Which means this wasn't planned in advance and was a recent development. So either it's a corporate decision, or Raja has hit some kind of rough patch in life.

 

[tamz_msc]

I think the reasons are obvious, and I wouldn't be surprised if he's no longer the lead after coming back from this sabbatical. The more interesting question is what will this development bode for the future of RTG.

 

[Ancalagon44]

Thank goodness we know Lisa Su is competent.

Raja... I don't want to pass judgment, I just don't know. I mean, he probably had very difficult constraints to work with, such as low budget. Ryzen probably got most of the resources. It could be that he is just exhausted after pushing for so long to launch Vega.

 

[Elixer]

Here is his letter:

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

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

 

[sandorski]

Here is his letter:

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

Maybe just burnt out. I suppose we'll see in a few months.

 

[krumme]

He has been working 20hrs a day for a year. He mentioned himself a month back or so.
Whatever happened and the reason he is probably near death. If he knows it or not.

He is into all sorts of 1 level management work. Combined with amd rtg never ending do it all strategy.

Its pretty darn sorry if he cant continue because its profiles with his vision and technical theft that is needed to move the tech forward.

They just need some solid support and management. Like a economic strong COO besides him.
They cant look at cpu group that target nearly all markets. The reason for that is so to speak purely coincidentally. Avx2 and avx512 drags Intel processors down in many segments and samsung lpp is perfectly suited to servers and mobile markets. Its factors out of amd control.
On the gpu market there is no such factors.
Take a profile like raja and put him in rtg and its like a child in a candy store. They are going to eat untill they explode.
It can be seen years in advance.
The responsibility is Lisa.

 

[Guru]

Pretty sure he is going to be out. He did okay on the software side of things, Polaris was a success, but it wasn't without major hiccups and its aimed at just half of the gaming market, while Vega was an unmitigated disaster.

Yeah its decent at computing and they are likely to do okay there, especially with the PRO versions of it, but Nvidia is already shipping out Volta for AI and various development even as we speak, its still a long way of from broad consumer release, but Vega was supposed to be faster than the 1080ti/Titan XP in all spheres, being over a year late it was supposed to be more in line with Volta, not significantly behind big Pascal.

 

[Samwell]

Why should he be out? It's clearly mentioned that he's coming back and also he stated pretty clear that his position will change some bit and probably someone else should take parts of his work:

As we enter 2018, I will be shifting my focus more toward architecting and realizing this vision and rebalancing my operational responsibilities.

Raja concentrating more on architecture sounds pretty good for me. He was always more an engineer than a business guy. He also was never too good in all this marketing stuff, so it wouldn't be bad to have someone else do this.

 

[SirDinadan]

"did okay on the software side of things"

This is a rather big misconception.

Yes, Crimson has improved the situation a lot (driver stability, general UI, look and feel), but if you dig deeper, it's not that great still.

pros:
- overall driver stability, not too many glitches with new games
- Blender now reportedly works great with AMD dGPUs - feature and performance parity

cons:
- the driver team is still ultra slow, when problem occurs - VSR was not working for a month after Win10 creators update for example
- integrated graphics drivers with DX12 crash with many games
- OpenCL, HSA is dead(?)
- AMD was big on VR back when Fury launched (LiquidVR), it wasn't that pivotal at all with Vega
- GPUOpen initiative tech didn't find its way into any game

For the Vega launch AMD should have asked (money) some game developers (HITMAN, DeusEx, DOOM, Frostbite engine) to make some Vega-specific optimizations to demonstrate the card's capabilities. I see this as the biggest issue. Instead, what we can see is that NVIDIA has closed the gap considerably in many games that favored AMD in the past (HITMAN, DOOM and even AotS).

 

[iBoMbY]

Raja concentrating more on architecture sounds pretty good for me. He was always more an engineer than a business guy. He also was never too good in all this marketing stuff, so it wouldn't be bad to have someone else do this.

Yes, I think that's a possible outcome. Make him RTG Technical Director, and another person RTG Managing Director, or something like that.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

Lol, AMD's guys have had a hard year, and Raja decides to spend some time with his family rather than all of his time at work, and this forum immediately starts jumping onto the doom and gloom fire wagon. This place is so out of touch sometimes.

 

[piesquared]

Lol, AMD's guys have had a hard year, and Raja decides to spend some time with his family rather than all of his time at work, and this forum immediately starts jumping onto the doom and gloom fire wagon. This place is so out of touch sometimes.

I think there are some that are just using this opportunity to spread FUD, and the others must not have families to understand the importance of those responsibilities.

 

[nathanddrews]

Dr. Su, MAGA! (Make AMD Great Again)

 

[nathanddrews]

Vega is going to look a lot more attractive as the midrange and low end cards hit the market, I think. I hope Raja gets the appropriate kudos for putting that in motion, rather than simply being viewed as "ousted due to Vega failures" like many claim.

 

[maddie]

Yes, I think that's a possible outcome. Make him RTG Technical Director, and another person RTG Managing Director, or something like that.

Exactly.

It's obvious that Raja is a tech nerd. Managing a large division and simultaneously trying to be deep in the tech is pretty much impossible. I always had problems with the assumption that great talent HAD to move up the corporate triangle. Besides the Peter Principle at work, great talent often got frustrated in missing their passion. Why should a VP have more worth than the lead engineer on a project, especially for a high tech firm?

 

[krumme]

Exactly.

It's obvious that Raja is a tech nerd. Managing a large division and simultaneously trying to be deep in the tech is pretty much impossible. I always had problems with the assumption that great talent HAD to move up the corporate triangle. Besides the Peter Principle at work, great talent often got frustrated in missing their passion. Why should a VP have more worth than the lead engineer on a project, especially for a high tech firm?

There are far to few product nerds in control. Usually you recruit for other competences that give result on a 2-3 year perspective. Its called shareholder value.
Raja got tons of talent and it actually looks to me he is the man for Mark Papermasters job when he settle a little. It could propel AMD to another value completely.
Hi has got brains in spades, crazy passion and his competences within software is bar non the most needed in the years forward if you want to make a world class tech company.
Looking at his letter it seems he can come back, if he havnt overloaded his brain and can even remember his childrens aprox birthday or names.

 

[zinfamous]

It's weird how a product that is near impossible to buy is a "disastrous failure." Hell, it even does exactly what it was designed to do: significantly out-compute the competition.

 

[sandorski]

It's weird how a product that is near impossible to buy is a "disastrous failure." Hell, it even does exactly what it was designed to do: significantly out-compute the competition.

ikr. If it weren't for Mining, AMD/RTG would be suffering. I'm still waiting for my 570 to ship that I ordered in May. AMD/RTG should have had a good Quarter on GPU sales.

 

[Rifter]

I guess the people calling for his head in the locked vega thread wernt that far off after-all. Even if it was a overreaction. I doubt he will be back in the same capacity, if hes back he will likely be demoted, which is fine.

RX Vega was a unmitigated disaster. Someone needs to take responsibility for that. RTG needed something to compete with 1080Ti/titan/volta, and they didnt even deliver something to compete effectively in all performance metrics with year old Pascal.

I think they just needed a change, new blood, so this is a good move overall for RTG as i dont think raja really sees what needs to happen when he says things like:

"We entered the high-end gaming, professional workstation and machine intelligence markets with Vega in a very short period of time"

Which isnt 100% true. For sure Vega is a compute beast, this is not in doubt. Nvidia is actually worried about this or they never would have unlocked the compute drivers for their non-pro cards. Props to AMD for pulling this off. This is a huge win.

But high end gaming? high end gaming to me and i think alot of enthusiast right now is 4k, and current high end gaming cards are 1080Ti and Titan. As Currently the only cards on the market that can push maxed out 4k is 1080Ti and the Titan. This is where AMD needs to be performance wise to truly be in the high end gaming market they/raja think they are in.

This was my main issue with Raja, he lied alot, or not flat out lied but didnt tell the full truth. He would make general statements about vega that were very true in compute world but not at all true for RX in gaming world. I realize he was trying to show vega in the best possible light, but its better to be truthful than dance around with words the RX issues IMO.

Vega only has the lower tier cards left to launch, we have the high end already, when Volta launches Vega isnt even going to be competitive in all metrics in the mid range market likely loosing to a 2060/2070 especially in perf/watt let alone the actual high end(xx80 series and higher) gaming volta cards. Not sure what RTG's plan for volta is, im hoping its a sped up Navi launch, I dont think a vega respin is going to cut it.

RTG needs someone with vision and drive to take over Rajas post and speed up the Navi timeline and actually make Navi a true high end gaming card like they thought vega would be, one thats competitive with Nvidias current top end cards. Not someone who thinks they are already there like raja.

RTG needs someone who can speed them up, and get them back on the same pace as Nvidia's releases, not almost a full generation behind, you dont win back marketshare from being a generation behind. They really need a Ryzen type win for RTG to get back in the game, and they need to find the personnel to make that happen.

 

[Qwertilot]

I think at this point they'd settle for getting back to launching fully coherent ranges of GFX cards. Doesn't need a magic manager. It needs money.

Zen looks good enough to provide that going forwards but it'll be a few years until it feeds through properly, and until then it won't be at all easy.

Closing the gap to NV is going to be very hard. Maybe even a lost cause at this point.

 

[Jackie60]

The guy's an idiot, he chose neither brute force nor refined architecture and helped create a massively complex never to be fully utilised turd. Start by doing the simple stuff well again! Look at how pitiful the performance improvement is compared to the Fury X. Vega is a useless POS and everyone knows it. By the time it works as it should we'll be well past Navi and Volta and it'll be like the Difference engine.

 

[Phynaz]

Buh-bye

 

[Phynaz]

Lol, AMD's guys have had a hard year, and Raja decides to spend some time with his family rather than all of his time at work, and this forum immediately starts jumping onto the doom and gloom fire wagon. This place is so out of touch sometimes.

"Spend time with family" is code for "relieved of duties".