AMD is losing another high-profile executive within its Radeon Technologies Group, the division former graphics boss Raja Koduri (now at Intel) was in charge in of leading up to the launch of Vega. This time it's Mike Rayfield, senior vice president and general manager, who is stepping down.
"Mike is retiring at the end of the year," AMD confirmed in an email to our friends at AnandTech. "He has made the decision to spend more time with his family and pursue his personal passions. David Wang will be interim lead for Radeon Technologies Group while we finalize search for a new business leader."
It's difficult not to view the future of AMD's graphics solutions as being in a state of flummox. There's definitely a bit of uncertainty. That was true even when Koduri was in charge, but even more so now that AMD has lost some key players in the lead-up to Navi.
Rayfield is a 30-year veteran in the technology industry. Before joining AMD, he served an executive role at Micron. Going back even further, he was also the general manager of the mobile division at Nvidia, where he led the team that created Tegra.
The loss of Koduri last year left AMD in need of a graphics boss. Rather than hire one person, it divvied the job up to Mike Rayfield and David Wang.
"Mike and David are industry leaders who bring proven track records of delivering profitable business growth and leadership product roadmaps," AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su said at the time. "We enter 2018 with incredible momentum for our graphics business based on the full set of GPU products we introduced last year for the consumer, professional, and machine learning markets. Under Mike and David's leadership, I am confident we will continue to grow the footprint of Radeon across the gaming, immersive, and GPU compute markets."
Now just a year later, Rayfield is resigning. According to our friends at TomsHardware, he doesn't have any plans to pursue other opportunities at the moment. As such, he probably won't follow in the footsteps of other former AMD employees who ended up at Intel, such as Chris Hook, Darren McPhee, and Jim Keller. Or at least that's the official stance. What are the Vegas odds for Intel snapping him up?
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