Martin Ashton leaves Intel and joins AMD Radeon team
It's a bit of a freak-fest of transitions for both Intel and AMD with people moving. Several folks from AMD's Radeon Technologies Group moved towards Intel. This round, however, it's reversed, Martin Ashton previously at Intel and Imagination Technologies now moves towards AMD where he has taken the position of corporate vice president for all Radeon Technologies.
Ashton is to join up with David Wang, though it is unknown what he'll actually work on, reports Hexus today. Previously Wang took over the technical duties from Raja Koduri who left for Intel. Wang has been building a new team for roughly half a year now. Mike Rayfield also works for the RTG team as previously reported, previously he was part of Micron but also was active for Nvidia, specifically on the Tegra-soc.
The statement they received from AMD goes like so: "We are very happy to bring Martin and his talent to AMD for our graphics roadmap and our business." Furthermore, reflecting on Ashton's new role at AMD, we were told that "David Wang is building a great team from both within AMD with key promotions and with key external additions like Martin".
Left Martin Ashton - Right David Wang
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Does Martin Ashton drive an Aston Martin? :p
Anyway, pretty weird to see both companies trading employees like this. Though, no offense to him but I think Raja was more valuable to AMD than Martin was to Intel.
How do you know? What do you base that on?
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Well for one thing, Raja was VP at RTG, he was the graphics director at Apple, and is now the chief architect for visual computing at Intel. He held both of the former positions for multiple years. Martin confuses me a little - I can't tell if he was VP of all of Intel, or VP of just visual computing. If it's the latter, that's not all that impressive, considering Intel's GPUs were never a selling point. PowerVR (the other big company he worked for), meanwhile, has never really been especially successful. Though, I think PowerVR's success was at its peak when he was still working there.
Again, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with him or that AMD got themselves a bad employee. I'm just saying that he's not quite as prolific as Raja, and to my understanding, it is his shoes that are being filled in at AMD.
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I don't think Raja covered himself in glory while he was VP of the RTG. Under his tenure as VP the RTG failed to deliver Vega on time and then it fell short of everyone's expectations.
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I can see why you'd say that, but that wasn't his fault. I heard how his team was split up to give priority to Sony and their PS5 graphics. Vega failed because he couldn't use his own resources.
Senior Member
Posts: 6663
Joined: 2012-11-10
Does Martin Ashton drive an Aston Martin? :p
Anyway, pretty weird to see both companies trading employees like this. Though, no offense to him but I think Raja was more valuable to AMD than Martin was to Intel.