amd Chris Hook leaves AMD

[Razor01]

4 hours ago, Trixanity said:

You see it all the time. People stop growing or run out of new ideas. So he very well could be washed up (which really does not in any form mean dementia). Maybe he has just hit a slump. Maybe he just needs more freedom (or less). Maybe he needs more resources.

 

We'll see what happens at Intel.

Well yeah but people like Raja, they don't stop growing.  Look at what Raja did at Apple for their SOC's, ya know it was because of him and a few others their Bionic chips are doing this well right?

[Tenelia]

For perspective, consider that this guy has been there for 17 years, and yet AMD is in the state that it is in...

[Doobeedoo]

Hmm so their marketing may shift differently now. Still got time for next year with bigger impacting products. 

[Trixanity]

23 minutes ago, Razor01 said:

Well yeah but people like Raja, they don't stop growing.  Look at what Raja did at Apple for their SOC's, ya know it was because of him and a few others their Bionic chips are doing this well right?

Given his recent work at AMD, he did stop but switching jobs and working on different things can help. Any creator can lose it. Doesn't matter the field. It's very few who churn out nothing but success and he doesn't have that track record - not anymore.

 

His work at Apple was from 2009 to 2013 as graphics CTO. That means he's been working on modifying the powerVR chips and perhaps laid a foundation for their custom GPU development but other than that I don't see your point. He was there for 4 years and left 5 years ago. I assume you mean their A series chips because bionic is their brand name for A11 because it has an NPU.

[Razor01]

1 hour ago, Trixanity said:

Given his recent work at AMD, he did stop but switching jobs and working on different things can help. Any creator can lose it. Doesn't matter the field. It's very few who churn out nothing but success and he doesn't have that track record - not anymore.

 

His work at Apple was from 2009 to 2013 as graphics CTO. That means he's been working on modifying the powerVR chips and perhaps laid a foundation for their custom GPU development but other than that I don't see your point. He was there for 4 years and left 5 years ago. I assume you mean their A series chips because bionic is their brand name for A11 because it has an NPU.

 

 

The graphics core and cell phone designs are started 5 years prior.  Look at Tegra, the latest Tegra integrated Pascal well after Pascal was released.    What we see with design and custom IP for SOC it takes much longer to integrate. A10 and Bionic if you look at OpenGL benchmarks, we can see that they are relative to each other based on the core counts and frequency.

 

Now lets get back to AMD, r600 was a "flop" but why was it a flop?  End users we saw a power hungry, AA performance diving piece of crap.  But If AA performance didn't take a noise dive.  It would have matched up against the 2nd best G80 at that time.  Still power hungry though.  What was causing the AA performance hit?  Lack of ROPs and the Ring bus.  The ring bus arrangement had too much latency for the 64 bit (if I remember correctly it was 64 bit) connections to the vram.  The vram was 32 bit connections, effectively half its bandwidth went to waste, even with a clam shell design not as dramatic as 50% drop but you get the point.  It was less than ideal.   The ring bus also eat up a lot of silicon, which in turn ate up a butt load of power and didn't leave space for more ROP's.  I don't remember if the ROP's were decouple for AMD at this point, I think they were, it started with this with the x18xx series if I remember correctly.

 

This was all corrected first, with the rv670, the removal of the ring bus.  Then with the rv770 pretty much fixed everything else.  Why did they only remove the ring bus with the rv670?  Because that was all the time they had for it. 

 

Lets go to Vega now.  What is its problems.  Well the same problems we saw with Fiji, the same problems we saw from GCN 1.0.  Why hasn't AMD addressed these problems, when Raja was not there?  Typical gen to gen architectural changes, they take a weakness and remove it or reduce it.  This was what AMD, ATI, were doing prior to the ATi buy out  and even the first AMD GPU. nV has been doing this with ever single one of their GPU's, good or bad.  So we are now looking at AMD that seems not to want to fix problems that have been with them since the first iteration of GCN.  Geometry throughput, shader utilization and throughput, bandwidth saving techniques, there are more too, where nV took a step forward, like tiled rendering.  Then of course you have power consumption again.  The first problem they should have looked into was the power consumption of GCN 1.0 we all saw that it was behind yet 3 gens down the road same problem just much worse.  We saw this coming right?  When I saw r290 and r390, Tonga, then thinking about Fiji, kinda knew its going to be drinking the juice lol.  Actually all the problems I've listed were there with GCN 1.0, and one was definitely there prior, geometry throughput.

 

It points to one this, lack of experience in GPU design, and we know they weren't lacking before Raja left, AMD gave use some damn good chips prior to that happening.  Lack of experience is not just only Raja, we don't know how many others left too, we know this because Raja stated that they are sorely needing more experienced engineers.  That means R&D cut backs made others to leave too, on their own accord or not doesn't matter.  We definitely know this because the same team members that were on Polaris were also on Vega's team, Linked in profile of AMD employee who posted Vega and Polaris in is profile.

 

 

If we go back through memory lane.  ATi and AMD used their architectures for a max of 3 generation of chips.  NO more.   GCN is going on its 4th and it looks to be one more with Navi.  That is 5 generations.  That is too long for one architecture.  Dramatic change in plans that shifted exactly when R&D was cut for RTG.

[Sharkyx1]

If they bring back The  Fixer  I will be so happy

 

 

Zen launch was desperately missing some of the fixer

 

 

[xriqn]

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