AMD Radeon Technologies Group Raja Koduri Takes Sabbatical

It is a bit weird news to report about, but you all have been able to follow everything AMD Radeon wise for years now. If you look back the past three years have seen many refreshes and recently a very difficult Vega launch. The news today is that the leader of the RTG has taken a 'sabbatical' for the remainder of the year, Raja Koduri is now non-active.

The news reaches us through our friends at PC Per who have been able to confirm the information within the AMD team.  The development is unusual and the fact that the info got out so public is even more unusual. We all know it, Vega has been a rough launch, high wattage, heat and performance at a level that is good, but certainly not exceptional. It seems that has taken some sort of toll, currently Raja Koduri stepped out while AMD's CEO Lisa Su will be taking over the Radeon Technologies Group for the time being.

The interesting thing is, AMD cannot even make enough Radeon RX Vega cards as they'll sell them instantly. So sales and investors wise things look good. Then again, it is just the high-end segment. And combined with the fact that fabbing yield seem to remain poor (look at availability) on the long run that hurts AMD, as they should be able to move more GPUs. Next to that HBM2 remains to be expensive and difficult to implement. But that all is a bit on the speculative side. Looking at the mainstream Radeon RX 500 series, there's really no problem there either, Polaris sells incredibly well, also thanks to the mining trend of course. The following letter was posted at PC Per, a direct email from Raja Koduri towards its team:

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

That would be a letter from Raja himself. Perhaps this story is totally blown out of proportion on the web, and likely the good man just needs a vacation after a tumultuous time. We wish him all the rest and recovery he needs. In the meantime Lisa Su will take over his job and responsibilities, so the team is put in trusted and experienced hands.