AMD Radeon Graphics Business Leader Scott Herkelman To Depart
Scott Herkelman says he plans to leave AMD at the end of the year after launching three ‘increasingly competitive generations’ of GPU architectures to combat rival Nvidia in the PC and workstation markets. In a post to X, he wishes the Radeon business well: ‘May you continue to punch above your weight class and one day… beat the final boss.’
AMD Radeon graphics business leader Scott Herkelman (pictured) said he plans to leave the chip designer at the end of the year after launching three “increasingly competitive generations” of GPU architectures to combat rival Nvidia in the PC and workstation markets.
Herkelman shared the news Monday on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.
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An AMD spokesperson confirmed Herkelman’s upcoming departure and told CRN that Jack Hyunh, AMD’s senior vice president of computing and graphics, will fill his role as general manager of the graphics business unit on an interim basis.
“Scott Herkelman has made the choice to leave AMD. We are grateful for Scott’s leadership and significant contributions to the AMD graphics business over the last seven years. He will stay through the end of the year to support a smooth transition,” the spokesperson said.
In his post to X, Herkelman said “godspeed” to AMD’s Radeon graphics business.
“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,” he said in the post.
“May you continue to punch above your weight class and one day… beat the final boss,” he added, referencing Nvidia’s dominance of the GPU market.
Herkelman joined AMD as the head of its graphics business unit in September 2016 after previously serving as general manager of Nvidia’s GeForce graphics business.
Under his leadership, AMD launched in 2019 a new graphics architecture called RDNA, fueling a new wave of Radeon gaming GPUs for PCs, laptops, gaming consoles and cloud computing.
At the time, the chip designer called RDNA “the next foundational gaming architecture” and said the new design would allow it to provide improvements in performance, power and memory efficiency in a smaller package compared to its previous generation Graphics Core Next architecture.
AMD would go on to debut Radeon graphics products based on two successive architectures in the following years: RDNA 2 in 2020 and then RDNA 3 in 2022.
When AMD launched the first RDNA 3-based products in December of last year—the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and Radeon RX 7900 XT graphics cards—it called them the “world’s most advanced” and said they would “unlock new levels of performance and efficiency.”
While the company has worked to take market share away from Nvidia, it has also had to contend with Intel entering the PC graphics market with its Arc GPU lineup, which debuted in 2022.