AMD confirms it has succeeded in bringing back one of the biggest profiles of the graphics chip industry; Raja Koduri. Koduri is an experienced GPU developer, with previous experience from ATI and AMD, but for the last four years been working at Apple. The goal is to breathe new wind into the AMD graphics division.
AMD may be bleeding money and market shares, but the graphics card maker has managed to strengthen its engineering team with several big names. It has been confirmed that yet another old ATI profile profile: Raja Koduri, who started working with graphics circuits in 1996 at S3 and moved on to ATI in 2000, where he spent eight years being one of the leading developers at the company
Raja Koduri decided to stay at the company after ATI was acquired by AMD in 2001 and worked as a technology officer at AMD graphics section for 8 years. In 2009 he was headhunted by Apple, where he led the company’s work with GPU development in tablets and smartphones. An area where Apple has been considered one of the leading players.
Koduri is now back at AMD as the new head of visual computing directly in charge of development of both hardware and software for GPU products. In an telephone interview with Nordichardware Koduri told us he had had four fruitful years at Apple and was looking for a new challenge, which he was offered at AMD.
– AMD offered me the chance of helping them fit their world class graphics technology into different market segments. But also further develop AMD’s existing solutions, says Raja Koduri.
With his long experience in GPU development and not the least many years at ATI and AMD, Raja Koduri has followed the development of the company closely. The last couple of years have been especially hard on AMD and to answer the question of how the company has changed since he left for Apple in 2009 he says that it has unavoidably lost a talented coworkers and engineers, but that the graphics section at AMD is still feeling healthy and motivated before the future.
– With the talent that is left and the high class IP (hardware) that AMD has we can see a lot of new possibilities.
Raja Koduri is also convinced that AMD’s focus on graphics is important both in short run and the long run. Among others he mentions the development in high resolution monitors in all segments, where you will need a lot of graphics performance to deliver a solid experience. Something we can conclude Koduri has great experience from working at Apple.
The focus for AMD will be working on creating the best possible solutions for both users and customers. Raja Koduri is the latest of high profile coworkers that AMD has managed to acquire over the last six months. With several high-up engineers from Qualcomm and Apple, AMD has built a seemingly solid foundation for the future and considering how the company has been doing lately this feels like a must to be able to turn things around.
How this will happen is hard to tell since the fruit of the labor they put in now will probably not manifest itself before a couple of years into the future.
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