AMD has decided that, for the first time since the company's acquisition of ATI in 2006, Radeon graphics should be given its own business group headed by a single executive. This decision has brought about an internal restructuring that makes graphics a core division of AMD, reflecting its importance to their business.
This new division is called the Radeon Technologies Group, and it's being led by graphics expert Raja Koduri in the role of senior vice president and chief architect. Koduri will oversee hardware development - such as discrete graphics cards, APUs, and semi-custom products - as well as software development, marketing, developer relations and more.
The creation of a dedicated Radeon division is big news for AMD, who previously split graphics across a wide range of product groups. The idea with this previous business model was to deeply integrate graphics everywhere and collaborate between various teams, hence why the GPU became such a big part of the company's APU and compute products.
While the model was good in theory, AMD's position in the graphics market has slipped in the past few years, with their market share in the discrete graphics card business sitting below 20 percent according to recent reports. The restructuring allows graphics to become a core focus with a single message going forward.
As part of the restructuring, the central Radeon teams will move to AMD's headquarters in Sunnyvale, California. AMD CEO Lisa Su hopes that this move will make the graphics division more "agile and vertically integrated", improving their product offerings in the future.
Speaking of the future, it shouldn't be too long before we see the benefits of this change-up. AMD has just finished launching their new range of Fury products, after which the company will turn their attention to the 2016 line-up, potentially featuring GPUs built using newer FinFET technology. With the Radeon team united, next year's product launches could be much stronger than before.
