HardOCP: Polaris is a turd and the ATI-boys are plotting another coup

An interesting editorial was published at HardOCP. The site explains it was not invited to AMD's Polaris tech event in Macau but provides its own analysis based on past experiences and talks with company and industry insiders. While there seems to be some lost love between HardOCP and AMD, the article contains some pretty interesting things.

The editorial paints a troubling picture and claims AMD is facing several major issues, including big problems with its upcoming Polaris video card lineup. HardOCP recounts that AMD has a history of picking exotic locations when trying to obscure deficient products and speculates this is what's going on with Polaris right now.

AMD picked Chinese gambling city Macau as the press reveal event for Polaris but insiders confided to HardOCP that AMD "has created a product that runs hotter and slower than its competition's new architecture by a potentially significant margin." The website is convinced that AMD has a loser on its hands and that the company is going to pull every trick in the book to "spit-shine the turds".

The second part of the editorial touches on the sour relationship between the leadership of AMD's Radeon Technologies Group (RTG) and the rest of the company. Talks with current and former AMD employees reportedly revealed that the creation of the Radeon Technologies Group was the result of some serious power plays during AMD's last leadership transition. HardOCP claims RTG chief Raja Koduri threatened to jump ship to Intel and that new CEO Lisa Su ultimately caved in and greenlit the creation of RTG with Koduri at the helm.

HardOCP talks about serious tensions and explains former CEO Rory Read is partly to blame for this because of his disdain for the GPU group - which rekindled longing for the good old ATI days. Koduri and his band of ATI loyalists reportedly no longer want anything to do with AMD and want to rip the Radeon Technologies Group away from its corporate parent.

The ATI boys believe a standalone RTG can be more competitive with NVIDIA but they aren't shy about buyouts either. HardOCP heard Koduri has a lot of love for Apple but that the ultimate goal is to become the GPU technology supplier for Intel:

With Intel in the midst of a shake-up under their new chief product guy, Murthy Renduchintala, the consequences of this agreement with AMD and subsequently the Radeon Technologies Group are significant. In the midst of Intel’s most significant layoffs in recent memory, looking to be around 12,000 positions, it has let go a significant number of graphics engineers and related functions (I am told well over 1,000) in anticipation that Intel will hand over many of these functions to AMD. This is a hell of a bet for new executive "Murthy" Renduchintala while under fire to take on an unproven team with a track record of false starts and missed engineering milestones. Whether Murthy will come to his senses before it’s too late remains to be seen. This is not ATI circa 2006, when Murthy (formerly at Qualcomm) bought a talented group of engineers formerly of ATI’s Imageon business. Murthy must know something we don’t about this team and for Intel’s sake I hope he’s right, because to us, it seems to be a bad bet.

You can read the full piece at HardOCP, it's pretty explosive material if it's all true.