Radeon Vice President Scott Herkelman Announces Year-End Departure From AMD
You can read his tweet below, but in essence, Herkelman says he will miss his co-workers, and describes the process of "launching three increasingly-competitive generations of RDNA graphics architectures" as "fighting shoulder to shoulder in the trenches." It's not hard to see why; nobody would envy AMD's position of trying to compete against juggernaut NVIDIA in the graphics space.
Indeed, under Herkelman's leadership, AMD's graphics division has managed to stay broadly competitive with NVIDIA. That's incredibly impressive considering that not only is AMD overall a much smaller company than NVIDIA (both in terms of market cap and in terms of headcount), but it's also competing credibly with Intel on the CPU front.
He didn't say as much, but we expect that the end-of-year delay in his departure is to give AMD time to fill his position. Herkelman signs off his message with hopes that the red team "continues to punch above [its] weight class and one day... beat[s] the final boss." We don't have to spell it out for you, surely.
As expected, Scott hasn't said anything yet about his next move. It's quite possible that he could appear at NVIDIA, or go over to Intel to help out with that company's graphics efforts. It's also possible that he could end up at another company, like say, Qualcomm, or maybe Tenstorrent. Heck, he might even retire. After the last seven years at AMD, we certainly wouldn't blame him. Hats off to you, Scott.
