Scott Herkelman, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Radeon Graphics Business at AMD, recently announced on X, formerly Twitter, that he is leaving the company at the end of the year. Herkelman’s departure marks the chipmaker’s second head to leave the company, after Robert Hallock, who served as Director of Technical Marketing, left in 2022 and joined the ranks of blue rival, Intel.
“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,” Herkelman said in his tweet. “I will miss every single one of you, fighting shoulder to shoulder in the trenches together, the excitement we shared during new product launches, and the joy of being in the arena for this wonderful, vibrant industry.”
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.
Godspeed @amdradeon
I will miss every single one of you, fighting shoulder to shoulder in the trenches…
— Scott Herkelman (@sherkelman) September 25, 2023
It’s not difficult to understand the second part of Herkelman’s farewell message; since heading his division over seven years ago and seeing three generations of the RDNA GPU architecture, the man had the unenviable and Herculean task of taking on AMD’s mean green GPU giant, NVIDIA.
At the time of writing, Herkelman doesn’t say what his next move will be, nor where he will be heading to next. Given the trend of ex-AMD staff though, it wouldn’t surprise us if he somehow ends up getting poached by Intel and more specifically, the blue chipmaker’s ARC division, which is currently in full swing with the development of its next-generation GPU architecture, Battlemage. That, or he somehow winds up on the enemy side, but that’s highly unlikely given the final message in his post.
“May you continue to punch above your weight class and one day… beat the final boss.”
(Source: X, Tom’s Hardware)
