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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dgingeri - Sunday, January 27, 2019 - link
Do you realize that they've been losing market share for quite a while now? The reason they've never overtaken Nvidia should be pretty plain. I'm obviously not the only one to have these issues.HStewart - Monday, January 28, 2019 - link
Have you check the stock today, all of big three (NVidia, AMD and Intel) have lost stock today.Basically it stating Gaming and Datacenter revenue below the company’s expectations
To me it sounds like demand for extremely fast GPU's is dying out.
Valantar - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
In my household, there's one AMD GPU-based gaming PC (mine, Fury X), and one Nvidia-based one (a workstation, really, but also used for some gaming, with a GTX 970). From my own experience, the AMD drivers are on par with Nvidia in some areas, and dramatically superior in others.The similarities lie in performance and stability: while I _have_ seen driver crashes with my Fury X, they are few and far between, and have mostly happened when I've been overclocking. Given that I rarely/never game on the other PC, I don't have first-hand experience, but I don't have the impression that it's night-and-day better - that would be difficult when the AMD reality is 2-3 crashes a year if you're tinkering with it.
The AMD superiority comes in when you look at features and customizability. The Nvidia driver control panel is badly laid out, bare-bones, and relatively feature-stripped, while AMD's is packed with features (including _good_ built-in OC tools), laid out logically, and easy to use. Want to set up per-game performance profiles? No problem. Adjust your fan curve, or monitor color depth, or set up gameplay recording? No problem. Or just leave everything at auto, and use the GPU out of the box - that works just fine too. My only gripe is that the "look for driver updates automatically" can't be set to download them silently in the background and ping me when it's ready to install. And no, that's not exactly a major gripe, no.
HStewart - Monday, January 28, 2019 - link
I might agree with compatibility with new games but I disagree with older games and some professional 3d application. NVidia has always had better quality in those areas.Sahrin - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
no matter how many bad drivers ATI (ie, the company you’re referring to) wrote, they never bricked any video cards with a driver - so they’re light years ahead of nVidia.HStewart - Monday, January 28, 2019 - link
When I was at my first job, I dealt professionally on OS level with ATI. At that time they were very simple graphics cards. Changes in OS over time, can make a perfectly good driver fail or even cause lock up.A good example is audio driver for my Supermicro Dual Xeon 5160, Windows 10 driver hard locks on it but I can delete driver from boot and OS will boot, So I serous doubt that driver brick the video card but instead driver lockup especially on older card.
rocky12345 - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
What you are saying are problems form a decade ago. As for the 4870x2 I had one of those cards and it worked as it should and I had very few problems with it at all every game I played worked fine with it. Well 98% of the games worked fine. Then I switched to Nvidia GTX 580 and that worked fine as well then the GTX 680 and it was supposed to be faster than the GTX 580 but for a lot of games it was slower than the gtx 580 or had problems. I have since switch to a AMD 390x and it is by far one of the best cards I have owned with very few problems and the drivers work great 99% of the time.just4U - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
After reading all the comments on drivers.. I still can't believe it's being said in 2019. I remember people being so against Ati's Radeon 8500 in comparison to the Geforce 3. Drivers suck they said.. I owned a Asus Geforce3 at the time and wasn't happy with it (in comparison to what I paid for it..) so I gave the card to my girlfriend and went out and bought the 8500.Not only did I never have a issue with the drivers, I actually got into the top 8 on 3dmark using windows ME no less.. just to prove a point. I think DigitalJesus was trying to prove a similar point but whatever.. (lol) My one small brush with being a tiny bit in the lime light. That card was my standby while waiting for upgrades for over 5 years.
The rumors surrounding driver support started with the first Radeon 100 series.. I think it was called the 7500.. At the time Nvidia had knocked off every video card maker except for Ati and my guess is if the rumors on drivers had stuck.. we'd have had only one video card maker today outside of intels integrated graphics chip. (..shrug)
0ldman79 - Monday, January 28, 2019 - link
ATI had a few issues, but they were limited to specific driver releases and they were patched, the bugged version was removed.The worst of it was the control center slowed down the computer. Nvidia control panel wasn't quite as bad, at least it didn't auto-load at start up.
Both companies have dropped turds over the years, both have created a few gems too.
just4U - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
If your not brand loyal and work with a lot of video cards you eventually realize that both companies have issues with drivers in some situations. I've never really found either company to better than the other on that front.. but that's just me.