Raja Koduri Takes Sabbatical After Vega GPU Launch
It appears that Radeon Technologies Group SVP and Chief Architect Raja Koduri has started taking a sabbatical from AMD this week and will return sometime in December. While Raja Koduri is stepping aside no other that AMD CEO Lisa Su will be taking the reigns of the Radeon Technologies Group (RTG) in the interim.
One might assume that Raja is being pushed out after the Vega launch, but no one can confirm that is the case. AMD has had six straight quarters of double-digit growth in graphics cards, so it’s hard to imagine a company wanting that when they are selling most everything they make when it comes to both Polaris and Vega. The cryptocurrency market boom in recent times most certainly helps sales, but at the end of the day RTG is selling large numbers of products and that should keep AMD and shareholders happy. That said, RTG also handles professional, embedded and semi-custom markets as well. What is going on internally is something that we aren’t privy to knowing.
Ryan Shrout over at PC Perspective managed to get the letter Raja sent to his team overnight that announced he was leaving on sabbatical. The letter states he’ll be returning in December and is taking some time off to be with his family.
RTG Team,
You havent 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 didnt 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
We have worked with Raja for many years and he travels a ton and you can get e-mail from him 24/7, so he might just need a break and since Vega was no grand slam some time away from social media as well. We are certain that Dr. Lisa Su will be able to handle RTG and hopefully we’ll see him return to RTG after his sabbatical.