AMD Pushing the AMD+AMD Strategy with Executive Promotions
by Ian Cutress on January 25, 2019 9:00 AM ESTToday AMD is announcing some realignment of its executive team along with some promotions. The idea behind the changes boils down to AMD wanting to focus its efforts on bringing the CPU and GPU strategy together, for future AMD+AMD combinations. The goal is that users should want to pair Ryzen with Radeon, or EPYC with Instinct, and by aligning the hierarchy behind that goal, it should be easier to manage and achieve.
There are several big announcements in AMD’s team today:
Darren Grasby, the long standing SVP of Global Computing and Graphics Sales will now become SVP and Chief Sales Officer, covering both consumer and enterprise, as well as becoming the President of AMD EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa). Darren has been at AMD over twelve years, and has been instrumental in the last couple of years for driving the adoption of Ryzen and Radeon as well as the sales message behind the product portfolio. His remit now covers all of AMD’s enterprise products, as well as the embedded products.
Dr. Sandeep Chennakeshu has been hired from his role as President of Blackberry Technology Solutions to become Executive Vice President of the Computing and Graphics group. Under this role he will manage the strategy, business, and engineering for AMD’s PC, graphics, and semi-custom product lines. Dr. Chennakeshu’s history includes time at Freescale (while Dr. Lisa Su was there), as well as President at Ericsson Mobile Platforms and CTO of Sony Ericsson.
Mark Papermaster, current SVP and CTO of AMD, is promoted to Executive Vice President. This is in recognition of his expanding role within AMD.
Forrest Norrod, SVP and GM of AMD’s Datacenter and Embedded Solutions Group, will now be in control of and have responsibility for both the EPYC and Radeon Instinct product lines.
The idea here is that AMD is going to push prioritize a synergy between Ryzen + Radeon or EPYC + Instinct across the company, leveraging on the success of partnering both sets of products together. In order to do this, it requires upper management to know what both sides are thinking, which is why we are seeing key employees now taking strategy and business roles covering both CPU and GPU product lines.
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dgingeri - Sunday, January 27, 2019 - link
I get bit once, I tend to forgive. I get bit twice, I get very cautious, but I eventually forgive. I get bit three times, and it's no longer a relationship I want to keep. I don't give a rats ass if it was 12 years ago.I had a friend/roommate who stole my credit card to buy stuff to trade for pot back, and then stole my toolbox for the same purpose, and in the mean time kept stealing the little food I could afford, way back in 1996. Do you think I'm going to just forgive him after all that?
My experience with Gigabyte is similar. I had a P35 motherboard that had horrible bios problems in compatibility with memory, but I dealt with it and kept the board for over a year. It was annoying, but I forgave them. Later, I bought a P67 board, and had similar memory/bios issues. Still, I forgave them, but was a bit more choosy on my board purchases. Finally, I came around to buying an x79 board, but only Gigabyte had a slot layout that I liked, so I bought their board. That board had the most annoying bios issues, from memory and sleep problems to USB device enumeration preventing boots, through over a dozen bios updates. I even had a bios update that rendered the board unbootable by anything except a USB drive. You'd think they'd catch something like that in testing before live release. Then, the USB ports started losing power. They'd still connect to self powered devices, but boot powered devices wouldn't work. It was at that point I decided I'd never buy a Gigabyte board again.
Like I said, third time, I quit trying to deal with it and just ditch the situation. Same goes for AMD graphics.
Death666Angel - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
Just to counter your point, I've had AMD 9500 Pro 128MB, no issues. I've had a 3870X2, no issues (apart from SLI/CF sucking balls, but that was true of my 8800GTS 512 SLI as well). HD4670 for my HTPC, no issues. HD5770, 7970, 290X, 280X, all fine. And the AMD /ATI drivers had great performance uplifts as well.
PeachNCream - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
Not trying to be a contrarian sort here, but if a series of driver updates significantly increase performance, that means the previous versions were written in such a way as to leave that performance initially unrealized and might legitimately be considered poorly written. With that said, I've had decent experiences from a reliability and image quality perspective from both AMD and NVIDIA over the past few years with the only noteworthy point being that NVIDIA seems to have their act together better when it comes to supporting us tiny niche Linux users.Tewt - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
We will just ignore then that when Nvidia improves performance gains in certain titles they are exempt this logic, right. /s"I don't want to be contrarian to your experiences but let me just shit on your opinion of the product I chose not to buy." is what I read.
PeachNCream - Monday, January 28, 2019 - link
Its only possible to reach the conclusion you've arrived at by getting enraged before bothering to read my entire comment. Calm down, read for comprehension, and try again.Spunjji - Tuesday, January 29, 2019 - link
If your architecture doesn't map easily to existing workloads (true for GCN when it arrived) and also is dependent on some level of manual optimization to maximise resource usage (again, true of GCN) then yes, you will expect performance to go up with newer drivers, and no, it doesn't require that they were "badly written" in the first place. You're unduly favouring one conclusion out of many and, in this instance, would be better off criticising the architecture design team for failing to produce a flexible architecture that performs well without extensive per-game fiddling.PeachNCream - Tuesday, January 29, 2019 - link
I'm not sure what point it is you're trying to make. Is this a complaint about the hardware? If that's the case, then what specific hardware bothers you and why?Schmich - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
I'm sorry but my guess is that you're the issue. If there were constant issues with ATi/AMD GPUs then they'd be bankrupt.My guess is that you had a bad overclock (booting Windows doesn't mean it's a stable overclock) or don't know much about computers. I mean you're actually saying "don't go AMD because hey my ATi Rage Fury was troublesome. Really?? Also people, don't go automatic transmission because my grand-father had trouble with one in the 60s.
I mean seriously what's wrong with some of you.
Duckeenie - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
AMD actually would have been bankrupt years ago if not for optimistic investors.rahvin - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
You don't know how the stock market works.