AMD Pushing the AMD+AMD Strategy with Executive Promotions
by Ian Cutress on January 25, 2019 9:00 AM EST
Today 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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Targon - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
You may have missed that Radeon 7 comes with 16GB of HBM2 memory. That memory isn't cheap.El_Rizzo - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
And it's only one part of the total bill of materials. If the cost where to be, let's say, double of that of a similar sized gddr6, but the complexity of the board could be drive down, for an examlple going from a 12 layers pcb to an 8 layers one, you would already recoup a large chunk of that upfront investment.If you also factor in the fact that it gives AMD the chance to achieve better performance whith "worse" silicon it might actually be good value for money.
Power consumption might also be a consideration.
Opencg - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
im not talking about radeon 7 im talking aboht navi dipshit.Alexvrb - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
It's kind of a prosumer card. Even at 1/8 rate (1/4 the MI50) the FP64 performance is very high for the money. So it can game but it can do work too, kind of a relatively affordable (compared to professional models) jack-of-all-trades.jaju123 - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
As someone who has had an AMD R9 290 and then moved to my current Nvidia 1080ti, I can tell you that the AMD drivers are far, far superior, and they had a complete rewrite in 2015 with the release of the Crimson Edition. Not only did they have a nice, modern interface, but the performance of the UI was also far more fluid. The Nvidia drivers haven't seen an update since like windows 2000 and it shows. Changing windows in the drivers causes serious lag on even the beefiest PCs. Additionally, the stability is actually worse on the Nvidia drivers. I rarely had an issue with the AMD cards, but currently I'm having issues with gsync flickering, black screens if I leave my PC idle, etc.You clearly haven't used an AMD card in a long time and you'd do better than to talk about your experiences with AMD products from 2007 while comparing it to your 2018 Nvidia experience. Doesn't make any sense at all.
nevcairiel - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
Not sure why so many people put so much value into the config UI. Who uses that daily?What matters is how the driver runs doing daily tasks. Gaming, video playback, rendering, what have you.
jaju123 - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
AMD and Nvidia are on-par when it comes to stability of drivers these days. Video playback might be slightly better on Nvidia as their hardware decoder is better, but that's not really related to their drivers.dgingeri - Sunday, January 27, 2019 - link
I really couldn't care less about the "look and feel" of the drivers. I care about how well the drivers support different games and how often they actually fix the issues that come up, and I have heard nothing but bad things about that side of things. In the mean time, whatever you think of the nvidia interface and control panel, they do actually work to fix problems in games and have a far lesser frequency of bugs with games in my experience.IGTrading - Monday, January 28, 2019 - link
As a former system builder, trust me, there was nothing worse than to have dead systems and dead video cards due to nVIDIA drivers and bad nVIDIA tech.AMD/ATi was sometimes better sometimes less stable, but we have never had dead cards due to the drivers.
Also, buying Dual-GPU cards so far ahead of their time (ATi Rage Furry MAXX) should always be done with the expectation to be in a particular use case where realized potential is directly proportional to the level of DEDICATED development on behalf of the game producer and the GPU designer. Since the two rarely happen with the user's interest in mind (nVIDIA has done it a bit more often, but with their own interest in mind, while sabotaging their older clients) then you should stick to the most popular use case which is 1 GPU per card, IMHO.
Spunjji - Tuesday, January 29, 2019 - link
I'm gonna go with the likelihood that this guy is bullshitting. He chose 2 cards that are known for driver complexity, and one that was the world's first Direct X 9 that became mysteriously famous for elusive driver "woes" right when Nvidia couldn't compete at all on price or performance. I had a 9800 and a friend with a 9500, I saw no more driver issues than usual. Nothing ever stopped me playing games or crashed my system "once a day".