In a post this afternoon to X (formerly known as Twitter), Scott Herkelman, who serves as AMD’s Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Graphics Business unit, announced that he is leaving the company. Herkelman's departure comes after Robert Hallock, who served as Director of Technical Marketing, left the company in late 2022.
“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,” said Herkelman. The fact that he is waiting until the end of the year should give AMD time to find a replacement to fill his position.
He added that he has enjoyed his time with fellow AMD colleagues over the years, including the excitement that builds around the release of new GPUs. In what seems to be a rallying cry to the troops that he is leaving, Herkelman closed this X post by stating, “May you continue to punch above your weight class and one day… beat the final boss.”
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…September 25, 2023
We can only assume that Herkelman refers to Nvidia in that last statement, which remains the 800-pound gorilla in the discrete GPU industry regarding market share and performance. But Nvidia isn't the only competitor that AMD must contend with; Intel joined the fray with its Arc graphics cards, which offer competitive performance for entry-level and mainstream graphics cards.
We last heard from Herkelman about a month ago, when he was lobbing bombs at Nvidia over early issues with the much-maligned 16-pin power connector on the GeForce RTX 40 Series graphics cards. "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," said Herkleman at the time.
"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 vapor-chamber issue. I was all over social media because I felt like it was AMD's problem and I was going to own it."
We don't know where Scott Herkelman will wind up next. Intel, AMD, and Nvidia have revolving doors of top talent that hop from one ship to another. So it's entirely possible that he could land at Intel, which is hard at work on its next-generation Battlemage Arc GPUs. However, it would be pretty interesting if Herkleman ended up at archrival Nvidia, which he has spent the past seven years fighting "in the trenches."
