AMD Hires Industry Veterans Mike Rayfield And David Wang To Strengthen Radeon Technologies Group

During the summer of 2017, Radeon Technologies Group head Raja Kodori took a leave of absence from the company, and we later learned why -- he had taken a position at Intel as the head of the newly-formed Core and Visual Computing Group. While that was definitely a big blow for AMD, the company has announced the addition of two critical members to the Radeon Technologies Group: Mike Rayfield and David Wang.

Mike Rayfield arrives at AMD after stints at Micron and NVIDIA (where he was instrumental in the development of the Tegra platform), bringing over 30 years of experience in the technology industry. He will take on the role of Senior Vice President and General Manager for the Radeon Technologies Group. Rayfield's duties will include managing AMD's graphics strategy for both consumer and professional lines and semi-custom parts.

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Joining Rayfield will be David Wang, who previously had a 14-year stretch at ArtX/ATI/AMD. During the time he had his hands no a lot of products including "multiple game console programs" and "every generation of GPU from the R300 family through the HD 7000 series." He most recently worked at Synaptics, but in his new position at AMD, he takes on the role of Senior Vice President of Engineering. He will be responsible for engineering, technical strategy, architecture, hardware and software for AMD graphics products.

Both Rayfield and Wang will report directly to AMD CEO Lisa Su.

“Mike and David are industry leaders who bring proven track records of delivering profitable business growth and leadership product roadmaps,” said Su. “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.”

AMD will be facing some serious competition in the coming months and years due to Intel's re-entry into the discrete graphics market courtesy of the aforementioned Visual Computing Group and NVIDIA's looming launch of Volta-based consumer graphics cards.