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This should come as a surprise to nobody, but Raj just made it official that he has left AMD: https://videocardz.com/73921/raja-koduri-leaves-amd

EDIT:
OK, totally not confirmed but what the hell, I can have some rumor-tastic WaCkoCFtech fun too.

RAJ IS GOING INTEL BABY!


Chuckula will be willing to provide grief counseling to AMD fanboys.
For an exorbitant hourly rate of course.

It's weird that he's using "we" when talking about the future, when today's his last day, right?

I was thinking that he just died.

whm1974 wrote:

I was thinking that he just died.

He's not dead yet. He's just resting. He wants to go for a walk... at Intel HQ.

Honestly that's not terribly surprising. His departure or his move to Intel.

I wonder if Lisa takes over RTG for the time being or if someone else is stepping up. Has anyone seen anything yet?

chuckula wrote:

rumor-tastic WaCkoCFtech

You have to admit, they hit the nail on the head a lot these days. It seems more and more plausible that these supposed "leaks" are deliberate. Not that there isn't a lot of trash as well.

This is really sending up red flags for me. Gonna wait for confirmation on the Intel story.

AMD chose to implement HBM2 on consumer cards not because of performance increases, but because it halves the power consumption of GDDR5, and they were so desperate for that power savings on Vega that AMD would pay 3x the cost of GDDR5 to get it.

The product pipeline is in a terrible place if they are forced to make those kinds of decisions even after an 8 month delay on a thin product launch. Worst of all, the raw performance difference between Fury X and Vega has been shown to be nonexistent when locked to the same clock speeds. This shows AMD relied purely on clocks for its perf gains, something they can not do again for its next generation chip. And they can't adopt HBM2 because they're already using it. Raja's departure tells me Navi is not in a good place and there are no last ditch desperate options left to improve it.

I hope I'm wrong, but given AMD's marketing decisions with Vega I won't trust anything AMD publishes until reviewers have Navi in hand.

DeadOfKnight wrote:

chuckula wrote:

rumor-tastic WaCkoCFtech

You have to admit, they hit the nail on the head a lot these days. It seems more and more plausible that these supposed "leaks" are deliberate. Not that there isn't a lot of trash as well.

Even a shotgun blast will hit its target, if you ignore most of the shot that missed. That site runs all the rumors, just so they can claim they ran the leak that pans out.

Kougar wrote:

This is really sending up red flags for me. Gonna wait for confirmation on the Intel story.

Oh absolutely. Take with a shovel full of salt and I'm just having fun with the rumor mill.
The fact that there was a deal to sell AMD chips to Intel for repackaging is just enough of a hook to make it believable (but not proof by a long shot).

chuckula wrote:

RAJ IS GOING INTEL BABY!


Chuckula will be willing to provide grief counseling to AMD fanboys.
For an exorbitant hourly rate of course.

Given that everyone blames Vega's issues (whatever their view of the issues is, anyway) on Raja, isn't that bad news for Intel?

derFunkenstein wrote:

chuckula wrote:

RAJ IS GOING INTEL BABY!


Chuckula will be willing to provide grief counseling to AMD fanboys.
For an exorbitant hourly rate of course.

Given that everyone blames Vega's issues (whatever their view of the issues is, anyway) on Raja, isn't that bad news for Intel?

Raj isn't blameless on the execution side [The single 6-pin power connector on the RX-480 is squarely his fault] but he wasn't Vega's design lead either. Ironically enough, we'll only really know how good the design team was doing under Raj when Navi finally gets launched since he was pretty much in charge during its design phase.

chuckula wrote:

Raj isn't blameless on the execution side [The single 6-pin power connector on the RX-480 is squarely his fault] but he wasn't Vega's design lead either. Ironically enough, we'll only really know how good the design team was doing under Raj when Navi finally gets launched since he was pretty much in charge during its design phase.

Indeed. Shouldn't forget the aggressive marketing decisions either. Or the question as to why, despite AMD's super-close partnership with Hynix, AMD had an 8-month-sized misread on HBM2 supply forecasts.

By Navi HBM2 issues should be mostly resolved. Then again I haven't exactly heard about Hynix or Samsung expanding production HBM2 capacity either. I doubt either would want to add too much capacity and risk the nice premiums they are getting on HBM2, and KLG will be adding tangibly to the demand.

None of the newflanged memory standards will gain any serious mainstream traction until mobile jumps the bandwagon. It's a no brainer why Hynix/Samsung would choose supplying >200M+/year high end phones at 4GB LPDDR4 + 128GB NAND each over Vega that will be lucky to hit 1M sold this year. This is not even including the lower end phones consisting 80% of the phone market.