What just happened? Scott Herkelman, head of AMD's Radeon GPU business, has announced he will be leaving the company at the end of 2023. Herkelman has spent seven years at Team Red, which he joined after leaving his role as General Manager of GeForce at Nvidia in 2016.
Posting on X, formerly Twitter, Herkelman noted that he oversaw the launch of three generations of RNDA graphics architectures at AMD, from RDNA 1 powering the RX 5000-series graphics cards in 2019, up to the most recent RDNA 3 used for the RX 7000 series that arrived last year.
After seven years at AMD and launching three increasingly competitive generations of RDNA graphics architectures, I have decided to leave AMD at the end of this year.
– Scott Herkelman (@sherkelman) September 25, 2023
Godspeed @amdradeon
I will miss every single one of you, fighting shoulder to shoulder in the trenches…
Herkelman has often spoken about his former employer in less than flattering terms. The Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Graphics Business Unit at AMD recently slammed Nvidia over its cards' 16-pin connector issues and called the company out for blaming users; Nvidia said they were improperly plugging in the cables. He did admit, however, that AMD had considered using the 16-pin connector in the Radeon RX 7800 XT and Radeon RX 7700 XT and that it could appear in future cards, possibly RDNA 4-based models.
Back in 2019, Herkelman said AMD had tricked Nvidia into overpricing its RTX 2060 Super and 2070 Super cards by cutting the previously revealed prices of the Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT, a move that Herkelman claimed was pre-planned.
The AMD exec made a subtle reference to Team Green in his announcement post. "May you continue to punch above your weight class and one day… beat the final boss," he wrote.
Herkelman has not announced his plans for after 2023. A return to Nvidia seems unlikely – though you can never be sure about these things. There's always a chance he might join Intel to work on Team Blue's next generation of graphics cards.
According to reports, AMD has confirmed that Herkelman's role will be filled by Jack Huynh. He was previously the senior vice president and general manager of the semi-custom group, which included covering all aspects of AMD semi-custom solutions found in the Sony PlayStation, Microsoft Xbox, and Valve Steam Deck.
