Mike Rayfield, senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s Radeon Technologies Group, will leave the company by the end of the month to spend more time with his family. David Wang will head the business unit while the company is looking for a new GM for RTG, which is left without a formal leader for the second time in one year.

Mike Rayfield, who previously led NVIDIA’s Tegra business unit and Micron’s mobile storage business unit, became the business lead of RTG serving as SVP and GM of the group.

“Mike is retiring at the end of the year,” confirmed AMD in an email. “He has made the decision to spend more time with his family and pursue his personal passions. David Wang will be interim lead for Radeon Technologies Group while we finalize search for a new business leader.”

David Wang, a renowned GPU engineer who worked at ATI/AMD from 2000 to 2012, contributing to all GPUs starting from the R300 down to the GCN 1.0, became senior vice president of engineering at RTG under the dual leadership model after Raja Koduri left. He will assume Mike Rayfield's duties until a replacement is found.

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Source: AMD

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  • Trixanity - Friday, December 14, 2018 - link

    So many people leaving AMD - especially in the graphics department. You have to wonder what's going on? Given the lackluster performance and roadmap you'd think they're fed up with the lack of ressources.
  • ACE76 - Friday, December 14, 2018 - link

    Many that are leaving are doing so because it's the best time to demand a big salary...it's because AMD is surging as a market leader...the GPU division got shafted in favor of the PS5 development..but that's going to change in 2019/2020...competitors better hope they don't succeed with the chiplet design on the GPU front.
  • sseemaku - Friday, December 14, 2018 - link

    Lol, its glass half full kind of optimism! AMD market leader in what?
  • R0H1T - Friday, December 14, 2018 - link

    Consoles, cores & sadly hype?

    P.S. we'll forget that 28core 5Ghz demo from you know who or The Glue.
  • III-V - Friday, December 14, 2018 - link

    I'll have some of whatever drugs you're on.
  • cap87 - Saturday, December 15, 2018 - link

    Lol, AMD has barely made a dent to Intel’s server business, not sure which drugs you’re consuming. They’re the budget kings for sure, but market leader? That’s wishful thinking. You have to be delusional if you truly expect Navi to be a major bump in performance compared to Vega since it’ll more likely than not just amount to a die shrink, still using GCN and with MCM nowhere to be found and given they’ve got no hardware based ray tracing they’re at least two years behind NVIDIA. AMD better pray for Intel to not come up with anything competitive or they’re toast.
  • Atari2600 - Friday, December 14, 2018 - link

    Salesman being replaced by hardcore engineer.

    Good move.

    Enough of the salesman's solution of re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic to make them look good.

    Now on with the engineering solution - putting frikkin laser beams on the bow of the ship to vapourise icebergs!!
  • rocky12345 - Friday, December 14, 2018 - link

    Translation he is leaving AMD to pursue a new job at Intel or go back to Nvidia. This is just my own opinion and if it is indeed true he is leaving for personal reasons to spend more time with his family etc then good for him. I guess I am somewhat negative because did not RAJA say something like this as well then all of a sudden he was working at Intel and he knew all a long that was the big plan because well Intel offered him bigger money to leave AMD and go work for them.
  • gglaw - Sunday, December 16, 2018 - link

    well didn't Raja leave to just coast along a stagnant Intel with essentially nothing good released since he joined them? They've been trucking along with tiny evolutions since Sandy despite getting some big names in the last several years. Financially I still like Intel since their numbers look great for how much their stock has been hammered compared to AMD so I'm still going long on INTC, but as a tech enthusiast their products for 5+ years have been pretty boring. Solid products and great value currently on their mid-range products, but still very boring (no one talks about them but the mid-range i5's when on special for $150-$190 range are still amazing gaming chips). They gave up pushing the mobile market and shutdown a billion dollar division with ARM and Apple designs dominating their products. On the SSD front, they have no presence left cutting off ties with Micron for NAND design/production and stopped even making their own controllers to fall back on Marvell and SM releasing more expensive variants of popular clones. Optane I highly doubt has made a single penny of profit considering how small the market is and the amount of R&D put into it. They announced a stronger push into the GPU market years ago which never happened and just reiterated this again for next year. All in all, for how much talent and resources Intel has, their innovation over the last 5+ years has been rather disappointing and all the big name recruits have ended up pretty close to complete fail status. The raw amount of cash/assets they have and the still dominant market share makes them a good investment IMO, but if 2019 doesn't have any blockbusters, their positives will slowly degrade no matter how many big names they keep signing on.
  • webdoctors - Friday, December 14, 2018 - link

    The R300 was a pretty amazing GPU at the time. That's the kind of leap that's needed now. Not sure how much David contributed to it, I thought it came from an external team that did the flipper chip, or maybe he worked there too.

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