Raja Koduri to leave Intel, founding AI startup

[porina]

 

Summary

Raja Koduri, who is perhaps best known for high level roles on GPU related tech at AMD previously and currently Intel, will be leaving Intel at the end of the month to found an AI startup.

 

Quotes

Quote

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger announced on Twitter today that Raja Koduri, the company's current Chief Architect, is leaving the company to found a generative AI gaming software startup. Koduri's exit comes five years after he joined the company in November 2017 and on the heels of a restructuring of Intel's AXG graphics unit that was announced at the end of last year. 

 

My thoughts

There have always been discussions about how "good" he is at his role both at AMD and now Intel. Intel is still in the path of getting up to speed in their GPU offerings, and it seems like this was internally planned long enough ago that Intel doesn't need any major adjustments to how it operates to continue. So we wait and see how Intel goes on without him, and also what happens in his next role.

 

Sources

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raja-koduri-leaves-intel-to-found-software-start-up

 

[starsmine]

Feels bad man, Dude is amazingly smart and one of the best in the industry, but two non-wins in a row (hard to call them a loss honestly) and getting sidelined has to not feel good. Vega was amazing, and it lives on with CDNA, ARC hardware was decent enough, but without the driver expertise that delayed it two and half quarters into competing with the wrong gen it just oof. 

[StDragon]

That's where the money is at, hardware designed and optimized for AI now that GPT has exploded like a technological atomic bomb. Processing more layers within a DNN is going to require a lot more silicon. Those fabs in the process of being designed and built? Yeah, they'll be working overtime for sure.

[Smextron]

Something I've wondered since the AMD Vega days, and now find myself wondering again is...  Is Raja Koduri just kind of... a hack / fraud?  I've never seen his name attached to anything that turned out to be good, and he seems to just keep failing from one position to another.  I don't mean to be inflammatory.  I'm just honestly curious.

 

I remember back when AMD announced Raja was going to be joining Intel to work on Vega, tons of people on HardForum were claiming he was basically a fraud.  I'd never heard of him before, so I just chalked it up to Intel / Nvidia fanboys hating on AMD, but in retrospect, maybe they were right?

[Taf the Ghost]

21 minutes ago, Smextron said:

Something I've wondered since the AMD Vega days, and now find myself wondering again is...  Is Raja Koduri just kind of... a hack / fraud?  I've never seen his name attached to anything that turned out to be good, and he seems to just keep failing from one position to another.  I don't mean to be inflammatory.  I'm just honestly curious.

 

I remember back when AMD announced Raja was going to be joining Intel to work on Vega, tons of people on HardForum were claiming he was basically a fraud.  I'd never heard of him before, so I just chalked it up to Intel / Nvidia fanboys hating on AMD, but in retrospect, maybe they were right?

No, he's a legit mind in the GPU space. The question is that he doesn't seem to be a great exec for Raster-focused GPUs. He's turned out great Compute GPUs. And he's going to an AI startup. That actually makes a lot of sense.

 

This should work out pretty well for that company.

[starsmine]

1 hour ago, Smextron said:

Something I've wondered since the AMD Vega days, and now find myself wondering again is...  Is Raja Koduri just kind of... a hack / fraud?  I've never seen his name attached to anything that turned out to be good, and he seems to just keep failing from one position to another.  I don't mean to be inflammatory.  I'm just honestly curious.

 

I remember back when AMD announced Raja was going to be joining Intel to work on Vega, tons of people on HardForum were claiming he was basically a fraud.  I'd never heard of him before, so I just chalked it up to Intel / Nvidia fanboys hating on AMD, but in retrospect, maybe they were right?

You wont find a single EE or CE (computer engineer) that would ever claim that about Raja. 

[Eida]

He's an amazing and accomplished person, and sort of feels like he doesn't get a lot more credit than he deserves, but it could just be me.

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, Smextron said:

Something I've wondered since the AMD Vega days, and now find myself wondering again is...  Is Raja Koduri just kind of... a hack / fraud?  I've never seen his name attached to anything that turned out to be good, and he seems to just keep failing from one position to another.  I don't mean to be inflammatory.  I'm just honestly curious.

 

Quote

Raja Koduri joined S3 Graphics in 1996. He became the director of advanced technology development at ATI Technologies in 2001.[5] Following Advanced Micro Devices's 2006 acquisition of ATI, he served as chief technology officer for graphics at AMD until 2009. At S3 and ATI he made key contributions to several generations of GPU architectures that evolved from DirectX Ver 3 till Ver 11.[6] He then went to Apple Inc., where he worked with graphics hardware, which allowed Apple to transition to high-resolution Retina displays for its Mac computers.[7] He returned to AMD in 2013 as a vice president in Visual Computing, which includes both GPU hardware and software, unlike his pre-2009 role at AMD which only concerned GPU hardware.[8] AMD reorganized its graphics division in 2015, promoting Koduri to the executive level by naming him senior vice president and chief architect of the newly formed Radeon Technologies Group. Under this role, Koduri reported directly to AMD CEO Lisa Su.[9] Raja lead the architecture transformation of Radeon Technology Group with Polaris, Vega and Navi architectures that made their way into several PC, Mac and Game Console (Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation).

 

He was at ATI when they were flying high all the way through to HD 7000 series (released after he left but still his arch responsibility), during this time the only objectively bad generations were the HD 2000 and HD 3000 series. Apple and Retina goes without saying. Back at AMD Polaris and Navi were both excellent, Navi had some release execution issues but still actually solid and developed very well with later generations. Having your team's hardware technology in the major consoles over more than one generation is quite a big deal.

 

Just remember Raja Koduri or anyone like him doesn't actually do the major parts of the detailed work, there actually hundreds to even thousands of people in these types of teams. One of the things that comes with those types of positions is you get the credit for the teams work, good or bad. Some huge important thing could actually be the work of a select group of key people that nobody ever gets to talk about or know their names.