Robert Hallock, AMD’s director of technical marketing, is departing the company after 12 years, he announced on LinkedIn (opens in new tab).
Hallock was a public-facing figure at the company, working with the AMD fan community on Reddit, Discord, YouTube and other platforms while also briefing the press.
“Over the years, I’ve had the honor and privilege of publicly teaching others about some truly stellar innovation: the Zen core family, 3D V-Cache, chiplet packaging, HBM memory, FreeSync, low-overhead graphics APIs, and much more,” Hallock wrote in his post. “After working in both graphics and processors for roughly 6 years each, I’ve learned so much.”
Hallock hasn’t detailed where he’ll be going next. On LinkedIn, he wrote that he would be traveling while he thinks about his next move. Hallock is one of several high-profile employees at AMD to leave in recent years.
In 2017, then Radeon chief Raja Koduri left AMD and now heads up the graphics group at Intel, including Arc. In 2018, Chris Hook, then senior director of global product marketing, left after 17 years from a career that started at ATI. That’s the same year that Jim Anderson, the general manager and senior vice president of the computing and graphics group, left. (Anderson now serves as president and CEO of Lattice Semiconductor.) In 2019, another public-facing communications employee announced his departure with a tweet.
It’s unclear who will take Hallock’s place at AMD. AMD didn’t respond to a request for comment before publication, but we’ll update if we hear back. He’s leaving just before the launch of AMD’s Ryzen 7000 desktop processors powered by the 5 nm Zen 4 architecture. Those chips will launch on September 27, so if AMD wants a public face to explain what PC builders will get out of those chips, it will have to find someone to fill his shoes fast.
