Ever since the departure of Raja Koduri as honcho of the Radeon Technologies Group, AMD CEO Lisa Su has been leading the division as it dusts itself off. Today, AMD appears to have found the new graphics leadership that it's been looking for. The company has tapped Mike Rayfield as the senior vice president and general manager and David Wang as senior vice president of engineering for the Radeon Technologies Group. Both men will report to Su.
Rayfield comes to AMD from Micron Technologies, where he was senior vice president and general management of the memory maker's mobile business unit, according to AMD's press release. Rayfield's résumé also includes a seven-year stint at Nvidia, where he was the general manager of that company's mobile business unit, as well. AMD notes that Rayfield led the team responsible for the original Nvidia Tegra SoC. He'll be tasked with "all aspects of strategy and business management" for the Radeon Technologies Group in his new role.
Wang is an ATI and AMD alumnus who will be returning to AMD from Synaptics, where he was the senior vice president of silicon systems engineering. Wang's long history with Radeon products includes work as the senior director of discrete graphics engineering at ATI and stints as the senior director of GPU silicon engineering, corporate vice president of GPU solutions engineering, and corporate vice president of product design engineering at AMD. Wang's résumé also includes design experience at LSI Logic, Axil Workstations, SGI, and ArtX. AMD says Wang will handle "all aspects of graphics engineering, including the technical strategy, architecture, hardware, and software for AMD graphics products and technologies."
Silicon design and production is a many-years-long process, so it'll be quite some time before we can assess the impact that Rayfield and Wang have on the direction of the Radeon Technologies Group. Still, this move appears to confirm that AMD has enough confidence in the future of its Radeon products to allow the separate graphics business unit that coalesced under Koduri to continue operating. We hope to hear more about Rayfield and Wang's plans for the future of Radeons soon.