Raja Koduri To Leave AMD, Next Stop, Intel?

The head of AMD’s Radeon Technologies Group (RTG), Raja Koduri, will be leaving AMD, and heading on over to Intel. This announcement was first reported by Hexus from a leaked email, but has since been confirmed independently from multiple sources. What’s interesting is that instead of heading over to somewhere like Apple, Raja is expected to join Intel as part of its new AMD partnership, as well as to bolster Intel’s AI research endeavors.

Koduri was part of ATI for a while before leaving to work for Apple as part of its graphics unit. In 2013, Raja left Apple to work for AMD and create a new semi-independent business unit for Radeon Technologies under the leadership of previous AMD CEO, Rory Read. Koduri saw the launch of numerous architectures at AMD, such as Hawaii, Tonga, Fiji, Polaris, and Vega. Hardware aside, Raja was instrumental in rebuilding RTG and fixing many of the problems its had over the years, most notably the sporadic release of drivers.

The leaving of AMD isn’t too surprising after the rather rough Vega launch, which resulted in Raja taking an extended sabbatical in September. Vega arrived very late as a competitor to NVIDIA’s Pascal launch, and suffered from numerous launch problems, including confusion over pricing and excessive power draw. Polaris on the other hand, despite being a mid-range offering, was very well received, with two generations of cards available so far.

RTG’s reshuffle also had some interesting developments beyond the architecture launches, as Raja instigated an annual refresh of drives, i.e. the Crimson and ReLive driver launches. There was also a rebranding of the FirePro cards to Radeon Pro, and the integration of the two driver libraries into a single package. Radeon Instinct was also launched as an effort to break into the enterprise and compute markets with a focus on AI.

Initially, a rumor from WCCFTech was that Raja was to join Intel, which has now been confirmed by Ryan Shrout, Editor in Chief of PC Perspective, with the tweet below:

The jump to Intel is not that surprising after a story broke Monday that Intel had signed a deal, or partnership, with AMD to integrate Radeon GPUs into the same package as Intel’s CPUs. Raja will likely offer his invaluable graphics knowledge to help better integrate the two components, figuring out the role of HBM2, driver integration as part of Intel’s release schedule, and help Intel break into the AI industry.

For the time being, AMD CEO Lisa Su will be taking over RTG temporarily while a new business unit manager is appointed. It’s a shame that Raja left, but he’s not leaving the industry, and in fact may help bridge a better deal for customers over the coming years as more powerful AMD graphics chips are found in Intel CPUs.

Update: Intel has officially confirmed Raja Koduri will begin working for Intel starting early December:

“Raja is one of the most experienced, innovative and respected graphics and system architecture visionaries in the industry and the latest example of top technical talent to join Intel,” said Dr. Murthy Renduchintala, Intel’s chief engineering officer and group president of the Client and Internet of Things Businesses and System Architecture. “We have exciting plans to aggressively expand our computing and graphics capabilities and build on our very strong and broad differentiated IP foundation. With Raja at the helm of our Core and Visual Computing Group, we will add to our portfolio of unmatched capabilities, advance our strategy to lead in computing and graphics, and ultimately be the driving force of the data revolution.” – Intel

You can read Intel’s full press release here.