Robert Hallock to Leave AMD After 12 Years

Seems like AMD is losing an important member of the team. He stuck through some very dark times, with lots of haters and fan boys

Just normal attrition, imo. Last couple of interviews with Hallock, I didn't think he was too happy doing the same thing over and over again with his job--I got that impression anyway--looks like I was right! Body language--is always the purveyor of much information for people who can read it. The fact that Hallock has no destination in mind leads me to think that he's considering whether to stay in this field altogether or to do something completely different.

As far as Raja goes, I have to say that after he left AMD, AMD's GPU development and production went straight through the roof! Raja helped with RX-480, and I think that was his last contribution, and likely the most advanced he was capable of providing. I don't see AMD missing anything with Raja gone, and I suspect he had already given AMD everything he could by the time he left to go to Intel several years ago to help them with their entry-level foray into the realm of modern GPUs.

As far as the rest of them go, I think the facts bear it out pretty well, and that is that after they left AMD, AMD went straight up like a rocket. The company is way ahead of where it was 5-6 years ago, by anyone's measure. I'm sure that a lot of people left AMD last year, but you don't know their names as they weren't publicly known, etc. Likely, lots of unknown people were hired by AMD, too. Not really news, just business as usual.

So would it be fair to say that it was a good thing that people left AMD because they were holding the company back in some way? Of course not, and I would never say that. It simply illustrates how the fate of huge, hugely successful companies cannot be reduced to the efforts of a half-dozen people, regardless of how well known they are to the general public. So, tech journalists should be cautious when generalizing the effects of a very few company employees--they won't, by themselves, make or break a company like AMD. I felt like the author was attempting to suggest something negative about these people leaving AMD, and if he wasn't, then I surely apologize. But the fact remains that since these folks moved on to greener pastures, AMD's fortunes have markedly improved. So you can't say it's negative; you can't say it's positive, and people leaving these companies is actually commonplace.

There's a tendency in the so-called "tech press" that I've noticed for many years and which I usually comment on, and that is that these companies are built on the work of many thousands of people, 99.9% of them completely unknown to the general public.

Wish him the best. Didn't know much about this tenure at AMD except what's in this article but hopefully it was amicable for everyone.

It seems He is leaving AMD for Google.