Raja Koduri is taking three months off from Radeon, Lisa Su to take over in the meantime

With the RX Vega 64 and RX Vega 56 now out and in the hands of consumers, it looks like it is time for Radeon Technologies Group head, Raja Koduri, to take a break and catch up on family time. Koduri will be taking a three month sabbatical from RTG, in the meantime, AMD CEO, Lisa Su, will be taking over to lead RTG for the rest of the year.

News of Raja's extended break first appeared online on Tweaktown but was later confirmed by PCPer, which managed to get hold of the internal letter sent to the RTG team.

Here is what the letter says:

“RTG Team,

You haven’t heard from me collectively in a while – a symptom not only of the whirlwind of launching Vega, but simply of the huge number of demands on my time since the formation of RTG. Looking back over this short period, it is an impressive view. We have delivered 6 straight quarters of double-digit growth in graphics, culminating in the launch of Vega and being back in high-performance. What we have done with Vega is unparalleled. We entered the high-end gaming, professional workstation and machine intelligence markets with Vega in a very short period of time. The demand for Vega (and Polaris!) is fantastic, and overall momentum for our graphics is strong.

Incredibly, we as AMD also managed to spectacularly re-enter the high-performance CPU segments this year. We are all exceptionally proud of Ryzen, Epyc and Threadripper. The computing world is not the same anymore and the whole world is cheering for AMD. Congratulations and thanks to those of you in RTG who helped see these products through. The market for high-performance computing is on an explosive growth trajectory driven by machine intelligence, visual cloud, blockchain and other exciting new workloads. Our vision of immersive and instinctive computing is within grasp. As we enter 2018, I will be shifting my focus more toward architecting and realizing this vision and rebalancing my operational responsibilities.

At the beginning of the year I warned that Vega would be hard. At the time, some folks didn’t believe me. Now many of you understand what I said. Vega was indeed hard on many, and my sincere heartfelt thanks to all of you who endured the Vega journey with me. Vega was personally hard on me as well and I used up a lot of family credits during this journey. I have decided to take a time-off in Q4 to spend time with my family. I have been contemplating this for a while now and there was never a good time to do this. Lisa and I agreed that Q4 is better than 2018, before the next wave of product excitement. Lisa will be acting as the leader of RTG during by absence. My sincere thanks to Lisa and rest of AET for supporting me in this decision and agreeing to take on additional workload during my absence.

I am looking to start my time-off on Sept 25th and return in December.

Thank you, all of you, for your unwavering focus, dedication and support over these past months, and for helping us to build something incredible. We are not done yet, and keep the momentum going!

Regards, Raja”.

Some will view this as Raja being pushed out following the launch of Vega, which suffered from its own issues at launch. However, it is worth noting that Vega is still selling out almost as fast as AMD can make it. In the meantime, we will just have to wait and see what happens over at RTG over the next several months with Lisa Su heading things up.

KitGuru Says: As the letter said, if Raja was going to take time off, now would be a better time to do it. After all, once we enter 2018, we'll all be looking towards the future GPU launches and eagerly anticipating the next wave of performance leaps. 

 

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