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AMD Reassembles the Radeon Technologies Group

59 points by deafcalculus 9y ago

slivym 9y ago
Does anything think this goes beyond simple corporate politics? Moving from vertical to horizontal organisations, re-organised back to verticals, bringing in a strategy group, moving underperforming execs into 'strategic' departments? I can't imagine this really having a palpable effect. Time will tell though.
- dragontamer 9y ago
  Raja, the previous RTG head, left AMD for Intel. > Does anything think this goes beyond simple corporate politics? The new RTG leaders changing the organization to better fit their wants, needs and strategy? I mean, I guess its basically corporate politics because that's all executive level positions really do. I doubt that AMD will very strongly change their future strategy. Its clear that AMD needs strong investments into GPGPU compute and needs to get back into the supercomputer-level accelerator game to survive in the future.
Nursie 9y ago
In the consumer graphics card space it seems like they need some sort of kick up the arse, organisationally. The 480 and 580 series were just not very competitive with nVidia for graphics performance (mining is a different matter, of course) and Vega turned out to be too low volume and expensive to make much of an impact AFAICT. Ryzen and EPYC look like a real leap forward for AMD. I hope we see something awesome and (more importantly) deliverable come out of Radeon soon.
- mizzack 9y ago
  > The 480 and 580 series were just not very competitive with nVidia for graphics performance ??? By nearly every account, the 480 was on par with or slightly behind the 1060 6GB at launch, and now the 480/580 is on par with or slightly faster than the 1060.
  - Nursie 9y ago
    Mid/low market competitive sure, they had a 1060 competitor at a similar price point and performance level. But the 480 and 580 are where the range tops out, they couldn't touch 1070+ performance in that generation at all. Shortly afterwards the prices started to rocket.
  - theandrewbailey 9y ago
    NVidia's product line extends beyond 1060. 1070 or 1080, anyone? Radeon can't touch those right now.
bearjaws 9y ago
This will be a key year for AMD, if they cannot make a GPU that performs as well as a 1080ti then Nvidia will clobber them with Volta.
- AlphaSite 9y ago
  AMD has GPU and CPU, so their diversity both helps and hinders them. So I don't think they can die, unless both go catastrophically wrong simultaneously, instead they choke the other of resources.
- DCKing 9y ago
  Even if they make a GPU that is competitive with the 1080 Ti it will be much too late. If NVIDIA stays on top of their game, there's no way AMD can compete with them with a far smaller R&d budget and mindshare. Furthermore, any AMD high performance GPU will not be obtainable if the cryptocurrency mining market stays like it is (and prices need to drop a lot before mining becomes unprofitable). AMD will likely never compete with Nvidia again in high performance unless they outsmart them somehow. Their next architecture, Navi, could be a very smart idea but I wouldn't bet much on it. It will also not launch before 2019. Their current Vega architecture does not seem to have what it takes to compete against Pascal, even with scheduled process improvements. Let's not forget that AMD is not dependant on having the top end gaming performance [1]. They can make money with their GPU tech in lots of different ways and they are in fact doing this quite well. So while we don't have to worry about AMD's viability as a GPU company, we should expect the market to become stale from a performance competition perspective. Which is what has driven the market up to around 2016. [1]: In fact their 2013 Radeon R9 290X, their last GPU that was the highest gaming performance in the market by most measures, performed very poorly because of a cryptocurrency mining bubble (gamers couldn't buy one at first, and cheap second hand 290Xes a few months later destroyed AMD's sales) at the time and simply because the card did not have Nvidia's brand recognition. You have to wonder whether they even want to compete in this segment if they were even able to.
  - bryanlarsen 9y ago
    Exactly. AMD will do well, but that may not be noticeable in the most visible way: top end gaming benchmarks. Nvidia has huge advantages in their architecture, resources and most importantly in their game driver team (both explicitly and implicitly because game devs use Nvidia cards). Those aren't going to disappear any time soon. AMD will compete the way they always have: with a lower gross margin. Nvidia's 60% gross margin vs AMD's 35% means that you get more transistors per dollar buying AMD. Nvidia uses their transistors more efficiently, so there is always trade-offs and room for AMD. And they've taken some really smart moves to exploit that. Shifting the industry away from DX11 towards DX12 and Vulkan has significantly eroded the advantage that Nvidia gets from their driver group. I also see ROCm and open source Linux drivers as a good way of eroding Nvidia's CUDA dominance.

59 points by deafcalculus 9y ago

Does anything think this goes beyond simple corporate politics? Moving from vertical to horizontal organisations, re-organised back to verticals, bringing in a strategy group, moving underperforming execs into 'strategic' departments? I can't imagine this really having a palpable effect. Time will tell though.

dragontamer 9y ago
Raja, the previous RTG head, left AMD for Intel. > Does anything think this goes beyond simple corporate politics? The new RTG leaders changing the organization to better fit their wants, needs and strategy? I mean, I guess its basically corporate politics because that's all executive level positions really do. I doubt that AMD will very strongly change their future strategy. Its clear that AMD needs strong investments into GPGPU compute and needs to get back into the supercomputer-level accelerator game to survive in the future.

Nursie 9y ago

In the consumer graphics card space it seems like they need some sort of kick up the arse, organisationally. The 480 and 580 series were just not very competitive with nVidia for graphics performance (mining is a different matter, of course) and Vega turned out to be too low volume and expensive to make much of an impact AFAICT. Ryzen and EPYC look like a real leap forward for AMD. I hope we see something awesome and (more importantly) deliverable come out of Radeon soon.

mizzack 9y ago
> The 480 and 580 series were just not very competitive with nVidia for graphics performance ??? By nearly every account, the 480 was on par with or slightly behind the 1060 6GB at launch, and now the 480/580 is on par with or slightly faster than the 1060.
- Nursie 9y ago
  Mid/low market competitive sure, they had a 1060 competitor at a similar price point and performance level. But the 480 and 580 are where the range tops out, they couldn't touch 1070+ performance in that generation at all. Shortly afterwards the prices started to rocket.
- theandrewbailey 9y ago
  NVidia's product line extends beyond 1060. 1070 or 1080, anyone? Radeon can't touch those right now.

bearjaws 9y ago

This will be a key year for AMD, if they cannot make a GPU that performs as well as a 1080ti then Nvidia will clobber them with Volta.

AlphaSite 9y ago
AMD has GPU and CPU, so their diversity both helps and hinders them. So I don't think they can die, unless both go catastrophically wrong simultaneously, instead they choke the other of resources.
DCKing 9y ago
Even if they make a GPU that is competitive with the 1080 Ti it will be much too late. If NVIDIA stays on top of their game, there's no way AMD can compete with them with a far smaller R&d budget and mindshare. Furthermore, any AMD high performance GPU will not be obtainable if the cryptocurrency mining market stays like it is (and prices need to drop a lot before mining becomes unprofitable). AMD will likely never compete with Nvidia again in high performance unless they outsmart them somehow. Their next architecture, Navi, could be a very smart idea but I wouldn't bet much on it. It will also not launch before 2019. Their current Vega architecture does not seem to have what it takes to compete against Pascal, even with scheduled process improvements. Let's not forget that AMD is not dependant on having the top end gaming performance [1]. They can make money with their GPU tech in lots of different ways and they are in fact doing this quite well. So while we don't have to worry about AMD's viability as a GPU company, we should expect the market to become stale from a performance competition perspective. Which is what has driven the market up to around 2016. [1]: In fact their 2013 Radeon R9 290X, their last GPU that was the highest gaming performance in the market by most measures, performed very poorly because of a cryptocurrency mining bubble (gamers couldn't buy one at first, and cheap second hand 290Xes a few months later destroyed AMD's sales) at the time and simply because the card did not have Nvidia's brand recognition. You have to wonder whether they even want to compete in this segment if they were even able to.
- bryanlarsen 9y ago
  Exactly. AMD will do well, but that may not be noticeable in the most visible way: top end gaming benchmarks. Nvidia has huge advantages in their architecture, resources and most importantly in their game driver team (both explicitly and implicitly because game devs use Nvidia cards). Those aren't going to disappear any time soon. AMD will compete the way they always have: with a lower gross margin. Nvidia's 60% gross margin vs AMD's 35% means that you get more transistors per dollar buying AMD. Nvidia uses their transistors more efficiently, so there is always trade-offs and room for AMD. And they've taken some really smart moves to exploit that. Shifting the industry away from DX11 towards DX12 and Vulkan has significantly eroded the advantage that Nvidia gets from their driver group. I also see ROCm and open source Linux drivers as a good way of eroding Nvidia's CUDA dominance.