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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

>Started in 2016 the dGPU group snatched showboater Raja Koduri away from AMD

We are in 2022 I still dont understand why Raja is popular. One of the reason why I have been extremely sceptical of Intel's GPU since the very beginning. To the point I got a lot of bashing on Anandtech and HN.

And I have been mentioning drivers as the major concern since 2016. Citing PowerVR Kyro on Desktop as an example. Even pointing that out on Twitter. With one of the Intel Engineers on the GPU team replied something as "GPU Drivers is a solved problem".

I do love to be wrong. But it is increasingly looking like another item to be added to my book of prediction that came true.

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I'm with you here. At AMD, Koduri released GPU after GPU that was slow, terribly hot and inefficient, plagued by driver problems, and overpriced. He left on terrible terms for a number of reasons, but one of them was his complaint that Radeon was underfunded and deprioritized, so he couldn't compete with Nvidia. Here we are, six years of practically unlimited funding and support from a company with a greater R&D budget than AMD's entire 2016 gross...

and he's done the exact same thing.

>and he's done the exact same thing.

That's how failing upwards works in this racket. As long as you have a great looking resume at a few giants in the industry with some fancy titles to boot, you're set for life regardless of how incompetent you are.

I was surprised he got promotion and even more resources under Pat.

I dont think Intel should axe their GPU, but considering Pat Gelsinger has zero BS tolerance, I would not be suspired if someone replace Raja if he doesn't deliver within the next 12 months or so.

Honestly, I'm in the same boat as you, until I realized I don't know anything he's done before he became head of Radeon Group. According to his Wikipedia entry:

> He became the director of advanced technology development at ATI Technologies in 2001.[3] 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.[4] 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.[5]

So he has a history of launching some really good products but I'd say it's been at least a decade since he's been involved in anything industry leading.

He has experience, I dont deny that. But nothing about S3, ATI or AMD in his era was industry leading or innovative. And considering his fall out with Lisa Su, I am firmly on Lisa Su 's side.

To be fair, in the consumer space, he seemed to be holding them back. In the data centre acceleration space, they're still essentially using a descendant of the Vega uArch.

And ironically after he left AMD started improving on the drivers

Very telling… the guy hasn’t had a success in the last 10 years and still gets top roles. Seems like he can sell himself well.

There needs to be accountability for these failures of execution.

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