Sadly he isn’t taking AMD’s marketing department or software engineer team with him.
Scott Herkleman, former Senior Vice President and General Manager of AMD’s Graphics Business Unit, has officially announced his departure from the company today.
Previously the General Manager for NVIDIA GeForce from 2012 to 2015, Herkelman had shackled up with AMD in 2016.
His departure will be finalized from the beginning of 2024 as Scott, the face of AMD’s Radeon bids farewell to the red team after a seven year stint with the company, though this doesn’t come as much of a surprise as Scott Herkelman has already been replaced by Jack Huynh as SVP & GM of AMD’s computing and graphics group from as far back as April 2023.
During his tenure at AMD, Scott Herkelman went beyond being a mere representative and became a true embodiment of Radeon graphics.
He stood out with his approachable nature and willingness to engage with the cancerous tech press. Not only did he frequently provide hints about upcoming developments, but he also actively addressed the self inflicted challenges of AMD Radeon graphics cards.
His open discussions about the vapor chamber issues with the RX 7900 XT showcased his dedication to transparency and ensuring customer satisfaction.
But of course, in typical AMD fashion it’s usually one step forward and two steps back, during his tenure with the company as the head of Radeon Scott suffered hardship after hardship due to the woes of the GCN architecture being put out to pasture with the Radeon VII alongside absolute piss poor marketing from AMD themselves.
The introduction of the RDNA architecture has been a tremendous resurgence for AMD in the graphics division as GCN or Graphics Core Next has swiftly been shelved and tinkered into becoming what’s known as CDNA, a compute focused architecture pushing the boundaries for data center computing.
Scott was the face of Radeon as the height of its newfound popularity thanks to the RDNA architecture, but in usual AMD fashion there’s always something going on and hindering their graphics division, such as how AMD had reallocated some of its TSMC 7nm wafer orders away from RDNA 2 production in favor of producing more AMD EPYC processors, which is understandable given how the current market climate continually favors NVIDIA even if they were to offer inferior performing products for more money.
And who could forget how AMD’s PR team botched RDNA 3 with falsified performance (per watt) improvements, proclaiming as high as 54% performance per watt improvement over the vastly efficient RDNA 2 architecture.
The actual performance benefits with RDNA 3 ended up being a disappointment compared to what was indicated by the marketing staff, with the 7900 XTX effectively being power starved to produce the alleged 54% performance per watt increase, in actual fact the card itself was extremely hungry and happy to chew through wattages as high as 450W, the hilarity only continues with the fact that NVIDIA’s monolithic monstrosity RTX 4090 graphics card actually provides superior efficiency compared to Navi 31.
When the moment did arise for AMD to rightfully sucker punch their competition, Scott Herkelman dropped multiple bombshells on NVIDIA regarding their faulty and downright hazardous 12VHPWR power connector that can quite easily spontaneously combust, thankfully media outlets and shills such as Gamers Nexus were extremely quick to jump to NVIDIA’s defense to state that burnt power connectors were obviously “user error”.
“We specifically, for 7900 Series, and even 7600, we didn’t plan on the new power cable, but 7800 and 7700 did have a plan for it”. “We removed it, and that was a purposeful removal. You shouldn’t blame end users for issues you have. You should catch and own any problems, just like we did with the vapour-chamber issue. I was all over social media because I felt like it was AMD’s problem and I was going to own it.”
It’s anyone’s guess as to where Scott Herkelman will go from here, more than likely Intel will seek to poach him for their next generation ARC “Battlemage” as they’ve previously done with other AMD rejects such as Chris Hook and the notorious party animal Raja Koduri.
I still wish that Herkelman took AMD’s cancerous marketing department along with him in his departure.
