RTG Raja's going on a break, Lisa Su is stepping in for the next few months

[MechPilot524]

Just now, DocSwag said:

Raja was previous corporate vp of visual computing. So while yes, he didn't have the same control he does now, he definitely did have pretty good control. Especially seeing as he was hired JUST TO oversee GPUs.

Maybe. As pointed above though if they were gonna dismiss him wouldn't they just hire an interim director and dismiss him? And I guess the whole HBM2 situation wasn't pretty - Linus did point out in his Vega review that there were and still are supply issues on HBM2, like there's only one supplier. Maybe that doesn't explain some of Vega's other downsides. But he did good on the 480 and 580, the miners ruined it (no offense to miners).

[YongKang]

1 minute ago, MechPilot524 said:

he did good on the 480 and 580

Oh hell yeah. They were pretty spot on with the value/performance.

[YongKang]

1 minute ago, Shreyas1 said:

TBH I'm kind of happy...

Hmm, look at it this way... If Radeon were to disappear, you'll be paying 600$ every 2 years for 5-15% more performance. Do you want that? #foodforthought 

[MechPilot524]

Hmm, Vega 20? On the high end that could make or break it for RTG. This TweakTown article says it's gonna be 7nm, 1TB/s on a 4096-bit bus with up to 32GB HBM2.

(source)

 

But that just makes Koduri's absence more strange/disconcerting. Vega 20, after the current Vega launch, will be even more important. Vega 11 has already been ordered, which I guess is a relief, but it seems they haven't finalized the Vega 20 fab process.

[Okjoek]

8 minutes ago, Shreyas1 said:

I SHOULD be sad, but I own a 1070, so TBH I'm kind of happy...

To be fair I'm kind of happy still too. I normally use low end affordable stuff and I consider my RX 460 fairly competitive still. I think it was a chart on Gamer's Nexus I saw the RX 460 only used maybe up to 10W more power than a 1050 which is a much softer hit than at the high end where you're seeing one brand (nVIDIA) getting the same performance by dozens if not hundreds of watts less.

 

That said I'm also really impressed by the GT 1030 (mobile MX150) more so than the RX 550 and I'd love to see some more mobile devices using that.

[Drak3]

27 minutes ago, MechPilot524 said:

difficult to do because Vishera was a space heater!

For the TDP assigned to the FX line, it wasn't that hot.

[MechPilot524]

1 minute ago, Drak3 said:

For the TDP assigned to the FX line, it wasn't that hot.

Well the FX series in general was really hot, but the 9000's were the worst and 220W is still a very hefty TDP. Point being that the FX-9590 was AMD's flagship processor at the time.

[Drak3]

Just now, MechPilot524 said:

Well the FX series in general was really hot

It really wasn't all that hot compared to Intel counterparts. The only issues FX had were single core performance and high TDP numbers on paper.

[rattacko123]

 
Well he did just take a 2 week "vacation" could be something family related.

[79wjd]

1 hour ago, DocSwag said:

Raja has been at amd since 2013 ish. I believe he had high rankings in the graphics division since then so he definitely has done a lot with these archs. Vega was definitely built since he joined.

I looked into it and apparently he joined shortly after Vega development started. 

[YongKang]

2 minutes ago, djdwosk97 said:

I looked into it and apparently he joined shortly after Vega development started. 

Hmmmm interesting... But the guy just took 2 weeks of vacation before. Something is up then...

[Shreyas1]

52 minutes ago, YongKang said:

Hmm, look at it this way... If Radeon were to disappear, you'll be paying 600$ every 2 years for 5-15% more performance. Do you want that? #foodforthought 

True, but it does mean less innovation, which although I admit is a bad thing for most consumers, it also means my 1070 isn't going obsolete soon.

[MechPilot524]

Just now, Shreyas1 said:

True, but it does mean less innovation, which although I admit is a bad thing for most consumers, it also means my 1070 isn't going obsolete soon.

Well between DX12 and Freesync and how good a lot of these cards are, many cards won't be going obsolete soon. My R9 290 I mentioned before can still game pretty well and still likely has a future.

[YongKang]

19 minutes ago, MechPilot524 said:

My R9 290 I mentioned before can still game pretty well and still likely has a future.

Which model do you have?

[MechPilot524]

5 minutes ago, YongKang said:

Which model do you have?

Club3D RoyalAce. It doesn't have the memory clock of the Sapphire Vapor-X, but it has a faster chip clock. The Hawaii chips were flagship, high-end cards of their time after all. Not quite on par with the 780 and 780 ti but competitively a good alternative price-wise. I don't remember prices being inflated by miners back then like they were again recently, even though Hawaii was also all the rage for that sort of thing, but that was my first real graphics card and I hadn't been watching the market that long.

 

*Edit: I also liked it because it had a metal shroud, not a plastic one, and it had a really nice backplate with an engraving as well as a painted design.

[YongKang]

@MechPilot524 do you plan putting it under water? ?

[MechPilot524]

2 minutes ago, YongKang said:

@MechPilot524 do you plan putting it under water? ?

Nah, I'm gonna keep using it in various builds. It's powering a frankensteined former IT PC with a 2500k right now, but it'll go in my next build which is gonna be Ryzen 5.

[Bananasplit_00]

Well I think we will see him return for Navi launch, he is liked by the community from what I gather so I think they will let him do the final PR stuff. Could be that Su is just disappointed with Vega but wants to keep him for the media and what he has done with Navi so far. I wouldn't be surprised if he gets to step down after he comes back if Navi is the same thing again, I don't think two Vega 56s glued together will be amazing, but it's definitely cool tech

[ApolloFury]

20 minutes ago, MechPilot524 said:

Club3D RoyalAce. It doesn't have the memory clock of the Sapphire Vapor-X, but it has a faster chip clock. The Hawaii chips were flagship, high-end cards of their time after all. Not quite on par with the 780 and 780 ti but competitively a good alternative price-wise. I don't remember prices being inflated by miners back then like they were again recently, even though Hawaii was also all the rage for that sort of thing, but that was my first real graphics card and I hadn't been watching the market that long.

 

*Edit: I also liked it because it had a metal shroud, not a plastic one, and it had a really nice backplate with an engraving as well as a painted design.

Isn't the R9 290(X) the Titan killers? These days when you look at benchmark on modern games you see R9 290X/390X beating 780Ti's, let alone ordinary 780's. I had the R9 290 since 2014, they were definitely slightly faster than 780's, that's the reason I bought it in the first place even with the high power draw, otherwise I would've bought the 780 for its lower power draw if they are the same performance.

 

EDIT: I have the Sapphire Vapor-X card, left at stock clock.

[MechPilot524]

8 minutes ago, ApolloFury said:

Isn't the R9 290(X) the Titan killers? These days when you look at benchmark on modern games you see R9 290X/390X beating 780Ti's, let alone ordinary 780's.

The original Titan, yes. The original Titan was definitely aging when Hawaii came out. Par the 290X/390X beating the 780 Ti, at a later point you might be right. IIRC some time after they rebranded the 200 series and were about to drop Fiji they released Crimson software for the first time, replacing the older Catalyst control center, and also a massive optimization. That optimization may have propelled the Hawaii chips, which had more VRAM and better bandwidth to surpass the 780 Ti. Before the 300-series rebrand they released the R9 285, which only used 2GB VRAM and a 256-bit bus but incorporated technologies like color compression and the like, and beat out the 280X with a 3GB(?) VRAM and 384-bit bus. All the reviewers were like "this isn't that important it's probably a tech demo", but I guess they used those software improvements to finally get the full use out of the existing silicon.

 

TLDR what I know is this, the R9 290X trailed the 780 ti when I was building a PC in the summer of 2014, and the next year when the 300 series came out they made a noticeable optimization driver-wise for all GCN cards.

[MechPilot524]

2 minutes ago, VegetableStu said:

LOL @ all the firing conspiracies in this thread ._.

Yeah, I honestly don't think they're sacking him. The only conspiracy to me that makes any sense is that if they fire him now AMD stock prices will be hurt, they may want to wait for a suitable candidate before officially sacking him. But like we mentioned earlier he's overall done good enough with the initial launch of RTG/Crimson and the 480/580.

[RagnarokDel]

I hope not but perhaps he's sick.

[MechPilot524]

21 minutes ago, RagnarokDel said:

I hope not but perhaps he's sick.

If it's causing an absence this long, then it can't exactly be the common cold.

[MageTank]

Honestly, I completely get the guy wanting to take a break if that is truly what this is about. With the recent uproar that has been started, he is likely feeling the brunt of a situation he has little control over. I imagine he is taking a lot of the blame for that recent AMD tweet that "endorsed" the high prices of the RX 570, on top of the many Vega related issues that were brought up recently. This industry can become quite rabid at times, and those that get angry tend to ignore who might be at fault, and attack whoever they deem responsible. Not saying he has absolutely nothing to do with it, I just don't blame him for the retail price gouging, or for the tweets sent out by the AMDGaming and Radeon twitter accounts, unless he personally verifies each one before they are sent out.

 

He could also be doing what my father does, which is save up a ton of vacation days and just stop working at the end of the year. Every year, my father basically stops working from thanksgiving, all the way until after new year's weekend. Maybe Raja saved up an extreme amount of vacation days, and decided to cash in? lol.

[Coaxialgamer]

VEGA wasn't really a failure though. It was underwhelming for consumers, but amd still stands to make a LOT of money in workstation and servers ( their current w9100 amd s9100 are based on hawaii). 

 

I don't think this is a case of Raja being pushed to do this, especially considering a lot of the decisions about vega were made before he came back to AMD. Plus, you wouldn't want to kick out the guy who directed the hd 5000 series right?