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For the rest of AMD, this reorganization represents both a beginning and an end. Radeon becoming whole again will with any luck give the group the swiftness it has long needed and couldn’t find under the rest of the AMD bureaucracy. AMD is certainly trying to sell this reorganization as a positive thing, and having worked with so many people from AMD’s graphics side over the years I can only imagine that by and large for many of them this is a welcome change. On the other hand this is a reorganization, and while it’s not in AMD’s press release, from what I’m hearing the current CVP and GM of graphics and long-time AMD/ATIer Matt Skynner, will be leaving the company, so there will be changes at AMD besides just who reports to whom.
As for the Radeon Technologies Group’s immediate future, it will be interesting to see how long it takes the reorganization and Raja’s promotion to have a visible impact. When Raja first came back to AMD it was to take on hardware and software, the technical aspects of the graphics business where development is measured in years. However the rest of the graphics business that now falls under Raja’s control – the PR, the marketing, etc – operates on much smaller time scales and should be easier to change. What those changes are remains to be seen, but I’m hopeful that we’re going to see the first fruits of this change in time for the expected 2016 launch of AMD’s next-generation FinFET-based GPUs. The hardware will have been locked in for some time now, but Raja will have ample leverage to now change how AMD handles the launch of the hardware.
Finally, in the longer term, what remains to be seen is if Raja can reverse what has without a doubt been a difficult period for AMD. I think it would be remiss to point out that this kind of a reorganization would also be the precursor to splitting AMD and selling/merging parts of it, however from everyone I’ve talked to this doesn’t appear to be the plan. Rather there is a lot of energy over at AMD backing this reorganization, and that by making graphics whole again and putting it under the steady hand of Raja Koduri, AMD believes they can reinvigorate their graphics group. In the end time will tell, and for the time being there is a great deal of hope that in making Radeon whole once more AMD can carry on in what has been a 30 year legacy of graphics hardware development.
