AMD Reforges the Radeon Technologies Group under New Leadership

  

  

AMD has now revealed that the Radeon Technologies Group will now be headed by Mike Rayfield, who is now a senior vice president of AMD and general manager of the Radeon Technologies Group. Alongside Mike will be David Wany, who will act as senior vice president of engineering for RTG.   

Instead of replacing Raja with a single leader, AMD has decided to bring two of the industries leading business and engineering minds together. This change is not because it takes two people to replace Raja, but because it allows Rayfield to focus on the business side of RTG and allows Wang to focus on engineering, giving each leader more time to focus on specific aspects of the group. 

Another change is AMD’s movement of their Semi-Custom division into RTG, removing it from their Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom (EESC) division. This move is for two reasons, firstly due to the majority of AMD’s Semi-Custom chip designs being GPU focused and secondly due to the EESC division’s recent growth in the enterprise market due to the release of EPYC. Due to this change, the Enterprise and Embedded Group is now called the Datacenter and Embedded Solutions Business Group, which will be lead by AMD’s General Manager Forrest Norrod. 

  (Mike Rayfield, General Manager of RTG)

In Recent history, Mike Rayfield has worked for both Micron and Nvidia, working in each company’s Mobile Business Units. While he does not have much experience with graphics directly, with his stint Nvidia being focused on Tegra (The chip series that now powers the Nvidia Shield and Nintendo Switch), Mike brings to Radeon a keen business mind, one that has seen Micron’s mobile unit increase in revenue and profitability.

With his work with Nvidia on Tegra, it is easy to see why Mike was chosen to lead RTG, especially now that AMD’s Semi-Custom disivison has now merged with RTG. Most importantly his role as a businessman will allow RTG’s new President of Engineering to focus on RTG’s technology, rather than balance both the business and engineering sides of the business.     

 

      Rayfield brings to AMD more than 30 years of technology industry experience focused on growth, building deep customer relationships, and driving results. Rayfield joins AMD from Micron Technology, where he was senior vice president and general manager of the Mobile Business Unit. Under Rayfield’s leadership, Micron’s mobile business achieved significant revenue growth and improved profitability. Prior to Micron, Rayfield served as general manager of the Mobile Business Unit at Nvidia, where he led the team that created Tegra.

(David Wang, President of Engineering at RTG)  

 
David Wang can be considered as Raja Koduri’s true replacement, moving back to AMD after his time with Synaptics after quadrupling the size of their design teams and bringing a lot of organic growth to the company. 

Before Synaptics, David Wang worked for ATI and then AMD (who acquired ATI) until 2012, this makes him very familiar with the graphics market. His new role will make him responsible for AMD’s new graphics architectures, IP and chip development.  

 

      With more than 25 years of graphics and silicon development experience, Wang brings deep technical expertise and an excellent track record in managing complex silicon development to AMD. Wang rejoins AMD from Synaptics, where he was senior vice president of Systems Silicon Engineering responsible for silicon systems development of Synaptics products. Under Wang’s leadership, Synaptics more than quadrupled its design team through acquisition and organic growth. Prior to joining Synaptics, Wang was corporate vice president at AMD responsible for SOC development of AMD processor products, including GPUs, CPUs, and APUs. Previously, Wang held various technical and management positions at ATI, ArtX, SGI, Axil Workstations, and LSI Logic.

 
This dual leadership is designed to bring AMD’s Radeon Technologies Group back on track, with AMD being set to increase their graphics R&D budget significantly thanks to the success of Ryzen. Now that AMD has regained its momentum in the CPU market, the company is now aiming directly at Nvidia. 

You can join the discussion on AMD’s restructure of their Radeon Technologies Group on the OC3D Forums.