Raja Koduri takes a Sabbatical from AMD’s Radeon Technologies Group

  
Raja states that the past year has been hard on both him and his family, saying that he has decided that he would be taking Q4 off to spend some quality time with them. 

While many will think that AMD is pushing Raja off the front lines due to the perceived “failure” of Vega, this is not the case. Vega has brought AMD back into the professional and enterprise market and it seems that AMD is experiencing no issues when trying to sell both their Vega and Polaris based products on the open market. Raja’s RTG (Radeon Technologies Group) has provided a lot of value to AMD’s investors and while they have not been as successful as AMD’s CPU divisions it has placed AMD in a better position.  
Below is a copy of the letter that Raja sent to his team, explaining his time away from RTG and some of his future plans. 

 

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 stra, 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, Rajaight 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

 

  

Raja is a well-respected member of AMD, offering a lot of enthusiasm and a true love for his craft and the products he creates. Our hope is that Raja will come back to Radeon with renewed convictions and will continue to lead RTG into warmer waters moving forward. 

This also presents Lisa Su with a great opportunity to learn more about the company she leads, which could be seen as a huge benefit for AMD in the long run. AMD has now moved into a great place to a much better the CPU market with Ryzen, so there is hope that AMD will be able to up their GPU game as AMD’s revenues and R&D budgets increase.  

 

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