Raja Koduri, Radeon Technologies Boss, leaves AMD to Join Intel

shankly1985 · 8 Nov 2017 at 20:03

Rroff said:
Personally I suspect the truth is closer to him wanting to see a sell off of RTG (I've never been quite sure which side of that fence he sat on), possibly to Intel, and was frustrated by others within the company - finally realising it wasn't going to happen took a leave of absence and then moved on. I suspect this kind of thing has had a big impact on the development of GPUs at AMD over the last couple of years or so and contributed to why Vega has been so underwhelming.

But how has VEGA been underwhelming? It has done what AMD set out to do. Compete with Nvidia the VEGA was the 1080 competitor and VEGA does that. Only thing AMD lacks on is its power draw but even that can be reduced a lot.

Time will tell how much this effects AMD GPUs but I do think they is more to this.

Rroff · 8 Nov 2017 at 20:04

shankly1985 said:
But how has VEGA been underwhelming?

I think the number of people who've gone nVidia and G-Sync after waiting so long for Vega speaks for itself.

Brazo · 8 Nov 2017 at 20:12

shankly1985 said:
But how has VEGA been underwhelming? It has done what AMD set out to do. Compete with Nvidia the VEGA was the 1080 competitor and VEGA does that. Only thing AMD lacks on is its power draw but even that can be reduced a lot.

Time will tell how much this effects AMD GPUs but I do think they is more to this.

Must we still keep this up?

Do you really think AMD aimed their sights at 18 month old performance? They were suggesting it would batter Volta!

Technically yes it competes with the soon to be last gen but at what cost? Hugely inefficient, hot, noisy...

AIB partners are staying away on this one and who can blame them.

Raja dismissed

Vega is hardly going to go down in history as a roaring success!

w1ze1 · 8 Nov 2017 at 20:14

Martini1991 said:
Humbug, you're making it sound like Nvidia created and launched a GPU in 14 days

God made the world in only 7 so its doable IMO.

old gamer · 8 Nov 2017 at 20:22

w1ze1 said:
God made the world in only 7 so its doable IMO.

Of course it is, blue Peter made Tracy island with bog rolls and sticky back plastic in less than a hour so making a silly little graphics card is nothing

GoogalyMoogaly · 8 Nov 2017 at 20:34

shankly1985 said:
But how has VEGA been underwhelming? It has done what AMD set out to do. Compete with Nvidia the VEGA was the 1080 competitor and VEGA does that. Only thing AMD lacks on is its power draw but even that can be reduced a lot.

Time will tell how much this effects AMD GPUs but I do think they is more to this.

It's 14 months late, it draws a lot of power, it competes with Nvidia's 3rd tier card, there are no AIB cards 2-3 months after release and it's more expensive than people had hoped.
Just because AMD apparently set out to be disappointing doesn't mean it's not underwhelming after a 14 month wait.

Overlag · 8 Nov 2017 at 20:35

Bonjour said:
Possibility of Raja joining Intel?

its looking likely.

V F · 8 Nov 2017 at 20:37

Brazo said:
Must we still keep this up?

Do you really think AMD aimed their sights at 18 month old performance? They were suggesting it would batter Volta!

Technically yes it competes with the soon to be last gen but at what cost? Hugely inefficient, hot, noisy...

AIB partners are staying away on this one and who can blame them.

Raja dismissed

Vega is hardly going to go down in history as a roaring success!

What went wrong? How did he go from creating so many successes to this? I still find it strange how I never knew of this Raja guy until this year. Considering he goes as far back as the 9700 Pro... That is what shocks me the most as I remember that card very well.

Killer7xx · 8 Nov 2017 at 21:02

V F said:
What went wrong? How did he go from creating so many successes to this? I still find it strange how I never knew of this Raja guy until this year. Considering he goes as far back as the 9700 Pro... That is what shocks me the most as I remember that card very well.

I think it's simply because he did not have the budget at AMD when he returned in 2013. They were focused heavily on Zen and their share price was at an all time low during that period. I don't think anything went wrong, probably the opposite and he did what AMD wanted. They needed to make GCN last longer whilst they used their budget for Zen and Raja did exactly that. Polaris competes with mid range Pascal, and Vega competes with the likes of the 1070 and 1080. Navi which Raja also worked on will probably be the final design to use the GCN architecture.

Martini1991 · 8 Nov 2017 at 21:11

shankly1985 said:
But how has VEGA been underwhelming?

This is the type of thing that makes me want to disregard anything you ever say. You've no objectivity.

V64's came out at a price point that AIB 1080 occupied, while not actually being better. That in itself is underwhelming. That's ignoring the price that puts it at higher than 1080 AIB models.

All of this after one of the most prolonged launches I've ever seen is why Vega can only ever be described as underwhelming at best.

V F · 8 Nov 2017 at 21:14

What was the best ATi/AMD hardware and release?

Davedree · 8 Nov 2017 at 21:15

shankly1985 said:
But how has VEGA been underwhelming? It has done what AMD set out to do. Compete with Nvidia the VEGA was the 1080 competitor and VEGA does that. Only thing AMD lacks on is its power draw but even that can be reduced a lot.

Time will tell how much this effects AMD GPUs but I do think they is more to this.

I say this nicely but why do yourself and many others not understand the major problem with not just Vega but AMD's GPU lineup?
Firstly Gp104 is a laptop chip and then secondary desktop chip, so it caters for 2 markets. Amd are totally absent from dgpu mobile where there's a premium price reward.
Amd promised mobile p10/p11 but it was written off, check the amd website under laptop gpu's they don't exist. So Nvidia own the dgpu in mobile we all know that so that's problem 1.. So why is Vega underwhelming? It's performance in goldilocks zone is comparable between a stock 1070 to above 1080 which is OK. The problem that you and the others continue to ignore is the size of the die, the transistor count and the manufacturing costs of hbm2 and expense of it all combined. For 3 years of progress from gcn 1.2 (tonga and big tonga=fury, can you honestly say this is great progress from AMD? ) I'm not impressed considering it's marginally better than a 980ti@28nm clock for clock.

It doesn't compete with Gp104 that's the problem it seems to defend vega with this distorted viewpoint of, '' I don't care of the con's as long as the price and performance is there''.
Fortunately for Amd Nvidia are still greedy but imagine if Gp104 80 released at 350-450 and held current values of 300-400 at the time of vega release, luckily AMD assisted in propping up Gp104 prices. Hence we saw the 1070ti take a punch.

It is unsustainable for AMD to produce the current vega in high numbers, it's simply too large and so it will always be expensive to produce, it only caters for desktop and gpgpu compute servers etc.
GP104 has already done the damage as the Rx490 was substituted into the X box one x and so AMD were late to the party.
Lack of Aib Interest poor voltage power tables out the box and the current prices only time will tell if Vega was worth it. It's not to say vega is terrible, there's some great architectural additions like hbbc, and it's programmable front end and fp16 etc, But it's 150mm too bloody big.

Martini1991 · 8 Nov 2017 at 21:15

V F said:
What was the best ATi/AMD hardware and release?

5870 for me.
Came out at £300 pound and just smashed everything.

humbug · 8 Nov 2017 at 21:18

Vega64 is under whelming.

Lets be honest guys AMD Graphics have gone from strength to lacklustre under Raja's leadership, this needed to happen.

Davedree · 8 Nov 2017 at 21:18

V F said:
What was the best ATi/AMD hardware and release?

Thuban x6 and 9700 pro/hawaii for longevity

V F · 8 Nov 2017 at 21:19

Martini1991 said:
5870 for me.
Came out at £300 pound and just smashed everything.

If I remember right that was the last branded ATi release? Mine had ATi stickers on them. While it had AMD on the PCB.

Gregster · 8 Nov 2017 at 21:19

old gamer said:
Of course it is, blue Peter made Tracy island with bog rolls and sticky back plastic in less than a hour so making a silly little graphics card is nothing

Showing your age there bud

Martini1991 · 8 Nov 2017 at 21:21

V F said:
If I remember right that was the last branded ATi release? Mine had ATi stickers on them. While it had AMD on the PCB.

Last official ATI GPU as far as I'm aware.
6870 was the first AMD GPU I believe although even that had a mash up of AMD/ATI branding.

humbug · 8 Nov 2017 at 21:22

Right ^^^

The first AMD GPU was the HD 4### series, they were still under the ATI branding, with the HD 6### they dropped the ATI branding.

AMD introduced GDDR5 with the HD 4### series.

Gregster · 8 Nov 2017 at 21:23

shankly1985 said:
But how has VEGA been underwhelming? It has done what AMD set out to do. Compete with Nvidia the VEGA was the 1080 competitor and VEGA does that. Only thing AMD lacks on is its power draw but even that can be reduced a lot.

Time will tell how much this effects AMD GPUs but I do think they is more to this.

I kind of agree with you but they had so long with it, we all expected something special and even I was hoping for a 1080Ti killer but we got a 1080 competitor and something that runs with the need for Sizewell B to power it. Hot, no custom cards as of yet and it has been out long enough for those to have appeared. Basically, it is a year+ late to the party for what it is achieving.