On January 24, 2018, AMD officially issued a statement announcing the appointment of Wang Qishang as senior vice president of research and development at RTG (Radeon Technologies Group), reporting directly to Dr. Lisa Su.
After joining AMD, Wang Qishang will be responsible for graphics engineering, including AMD graphics technology product strategy, architecture, hardware and software.
In fact, talking about Wang Qishang, familiar with the AMD graphics users should have heard of him, he and AMD deep roots.
After AMD merged ATI with $ 5.4 billion in 2006, Wang Qishang joined AMD and successfully promoted the process transition from 0.15μm to 28nm eighth-generation chips, which is a remarkable achievement.
Next, please follow the author together, take a look at the chip industry 'big cow' legendary experience.
Wang Qishang graduated from Taiwan Jiaotong University in 1986 and later returned to the United States to obtain a master's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Washington. Master's thesis is a hardware technology for graphics processing. After graduating in 1990, he came to LSI Logic as a chip design engineer responsible for developing SPARC (Extensible Processing Architecture) system chip.
During his career with LSI Logic, Wang acquired extensive chip development experience. After two years, Axis joined Axil WorkstATIons as a senior chip design engineer with the same SPARC chip development and owning team.
In 1993, Wang Qishang officially entered the well-known SGI (Silicon Graphics) company. From chip designer to chip design manager, he was responsible for the development of Infinity Reality super 3D graphics accelerator. At this point, Wang Qishang Graphics chip made a bond.
In 2001, Wang Qishang became an excellent chip design and development manager. In order to better exert his own capabilities, Wang Qishang left SGI in 1998 and participated in the establishment of ArtX Corporation. As a chip design manager, he is responsible for Nintendo's Four generations of Game Cube home SOC development.
Game Cube graphics processor used in the code-named 'Flipper', 0.18μm process, with the then advanced graphics capabilities, is widely recognized in the industry.
In 2000, ATI acquired ArtX with a $ 400 million stock option and Wang Qishang joined ATI, a 12-year promotion from a chip manager to a senior manager, eventually becoming AMD's global vice president.
Under his leadership, AMD / ATI has successfully developed eight generations of products, from 0.15μm up to 28nm process, which played an integral role in the entire development process.
So let's take a look at what achievements have been made by Wang Qishang in the years of AMD / ATI.
Help ATI grow into the industry leader
In the second half of 2002, ATI's R300 architecture was officially launched, starting with Radeon 9700 PRO, the world's first DirectX 9.0-capable graphics card.
DirectX 9.0 performance, anti-aliasing performance and anisotropic filtering of the Radeon 9700 PRO were exceptionally good, defeating the flagship NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti4600, a single-size and high-resolution NVIDIA, even after six months of being forced to come out with NVIDIA The first GeForce FX 5800 Ultra with its DirectX 9.0-capable graphics card will not be able to withstand the power consumption benefits of the Radeon 9700 PRO.
Radeon 9700 PRO rescues ATI in difficult times, and Wang Qishang plays a crucial role in the R300's architectural design efforts.
It is with excellent energy efficiency, R300 win Microsoft's trust for ATI, the same year, ATI and Microsoft announced a development agreement: ATI to the then next-generation host XBOX graphics unit.
This broke the previous Microsoft and NVIDIA partnership, meaning that the graphics portion of the next-generation Xbox host will be replaced by a new partner.
In 2004, all the way to singing ATI's graphics card market share of nearly 60%, can be described as the graphics industry well-deserved 'one brother.'
At the end of the year ATI release news, using a new unified rendering architecture R500 will officially come out the following year, and in the following 2005, we finally saw the second generation of Microsoft's mainframe - the XBOX 360, which carries a codenamed 'Xenos 'Graphics chip, it is based on the customized ATI R500 architecture.
The core structure of Xenos is very different from that of a PC display chip. It incorporates 10MB of video memory to speed up anti-aliasing operations; the pixel and vertex processing are no longer separated and the same processing unit can process pixel or vertex data.
At this point Wang Qishang has risen to ATI's senior chip manager, Xenos from the initial idea to the birth are inseparable from his leadership and efforts, and GPU is more powerful and powerful Xbox 360 is one of the reasons why the PS3 can beat.
In 2006, the Nintendo Wii, a major revolutionary host in the gaming industry, was officially launched. As before, the GPU was still powered by ATI, codenamed 'Hollywood' and could be said to be a super enhanced version of 'Flipper' previously used on NGC.
'Hollywood' uses 'Vegas' + 'Napa' dual-chip design, built-in 3MB eDRAM, 24MB 1-T SRAM and audio DSP integration.
'Hollywood' also integrates a code named 'Starlet' ARM processor, this processor is very interesting, it is designed to run Wii's operating system.This design has two purposes, one is to improve the operation of the processor The efficiency of the game, the second is to prevent cracking.
Nintendo Wii GPU development work is still the responsibility of Wang Qishang, although 'Hollywood' performance is not very strong, far less than the 'Xeons' XBOX 360, but its unique design fully explains the concept of 'tailored', and Wii Can be described as a pair of perfect, and this is due to Wang Qishang and the team and Nintendo good communication.
In the same year, AMD announced the acquisition of ATI, AMD has become the only one at the same time have a CPU and independence alone product line of chip makers, Wang Qishang naturally came to AMD as GPU chip project senior director, in charge of the AMD GPU business line Design and supervision of class chips.
So what role did Wang Qishang play during AMD's work? It is safe to say that the research and development of each AMD GPU from the Radeon X1000 to the Radeon HD 7000 series embodies his sweat, and he has rich experience in leading AMD GPU to GCN era.
For AMD GPU business made concerted efforts
In mid-2007, AMD unveiled the next generation of the Radeon HD 2000 series of GPUs, the first in the graphics industry after AMD successfully acquired ATI.
Radeon HD 2000 series graphics card uses the second generation unified rendering architecture R600, full support DX10 API, the series of low-end models or the industry's first use of higher energy consumption 65nm process graphics.
In addition, AMD pioneered the combination of graphics and sound cards, and was the only product available at the time that offered a completely new unified video and audio output solution at various levels through HDMI.
As a senior director of AMD's graphics card product group, Wang Qishang is not only involved in designing such an outstanding architecture as the R600, but also as one of the proponents of the AMD 'Fusion' concept, that is, combining the CPU with the GPU for different features The two chips cooperate with each other, and this is the prototype of the AMD APU.
In 2008, AMD released its first Radeon HD 4000 series based on the R700 architecture, the Radeon HD 4850, a mid-range, midrange Thousand Yuan, but with unprecedented hardware specifications and performance, making it the world's first trillion Single-chip computing power (1 TFLOPs).
Of course, there are some important features that can not be ignored, including the unique DirectX 10.1 support and advanced PCI-E 2.0 bus interface, which have stood the Radeon HD 4850 at the forefront of the times.
In the face of similar products with NVIDIA, Radeon HD 4850 undoubtedly won the GeForce 8800 GT, once again subvert the price of the new market limit.
In 2009, AMD took advantage of the Windows 7 and DirectX 11 APIs and pioneered the Radeon HD 5870, the first product to support the DX11 API.
With a 40nm process R800 architecture, the HD 5870 doubles the number of stream processors over the HD 4890, adds up to 30% more core area, and significantly improves single-precision floating-point capability to 2.72 TFLOPs, the single most powerful single Graphics, let AMD regain the throne of performance king.
Even more surprising is that the high standard of the HD 5870 standby power consumption is only 27W, it is incredible, fully demonstrated AMD's technical strength.
At this time, Wang Qishang has been promoted to vice president of silicon engineering division of AMD Global Graphics Products Division. The Radeon HD 5000 series is exactly what he and his team of engineers are all about.
In 2011, the architecture that affected the AMD graphics card was born, which is GCN architecture for the future. The first graphics card is the Radeon HD 7970, which is also the first 28nm graphics card.
GCN architectures have undergone a significant optimization and reorganization at the lowest level of stream processor management modes and the internal organization structure is more flexible and efficient.In terms of instruction execution mode, GCN also changes the VLIW packing and throughput mode AMD has been using since R600, This change can be said that changes in the basis of the GPU computing mode, the development of AMD GPU architecture is of great significance.
GCN architecture is no longer pure pursuit of graphics rendering capabilities, but more focused on optimizing for high-performance computing, the concept of change, more in line with 'general-purpose computing is the future trend of graphics computing.' GCN architecture is exactly AMD to enhance common computing performance ideas Performance, and high-performance general-purpose computing can also bring higher graphics performance.
GCN architecture is one of Wang Qishang's outstanding works, and its important effect has hitherto not to mention Polaris series, even the Vega series also follows the concept of GCN architecture.
In addition to desktop and notebook-grade GPU products, Wang Qishang is also involved in the development of next generation host customization GPUs such as the Wii U, PS4 and XBOX ONE, as well as the AMD APU development mentioned above.
At that time, he managed the IC design team of 1,700 people in eight IC design centers all over the world. The business covers front-end logic design and verification, chip integration, physical design, program management, and silicon verification.
Wang Qishang and TSMC, Global Foundries, SMIC and other high-level fabs have close relations of cooperation, and work with them to promote the development of chip process road signs, AMD and even the key figure in the graphics industry.
In 2012, judging from the fact that the human-machine interface is an important future direction for development, Wang Qishang left the old company, AMD, to Synaptic, the world's leading designer and manufacturer of interactive development solutions for human-computer interfaces in mobile computing, communications and entertainment devices Senior Vice President, Chip Systems Development Engineering, to explore the future of human-machine interfaces.
Lead Synaptics to become the industry guru
Wang Qishang, who came to Synaptics, led the team in the development of touch, display, fingerprint recognition, voice control and multimedia SOC.
In addition to product development, Wang successfully led five acquisitions, the most notable of which were the acquisition of fingerprint sensor manufacturer Validity Sensors and the acquisition of Renesas SP Drivers that provide display technology.
The former allowed Synaptics to enter the fingerprint recognition market, the latter driving the rapid prototyping of Touch and Display Driver Integration (TDDI) and strengthening Synaptics' status as the king of the mobile display market.
In 2017, Synaptics acquired the product division of Conexant and Marvell's Multimedia SOC into the voice processing and smart home IOT markets.
After several acquisitions, Synaptics is the only technology solution provider that enables voice, biometrics, touch, display, processing and imaging. It has laid Synaptic's leading position in the human-computer interface industry.
Management, due to the acquisition of a number of companies, engineers team scattered around the world, different cultural backgrounds and different IC design process makes collaborative development has become a big problem.
Under the guidance and leadership of Wang Qishang, these teams of engineers gradually integrated into the Synaptics chip design team to achieve efficient and collaborative operation. Wang Qi Shang also unifies each team's IC development process, greatly improving the efficiency of IC development.
Now that Synaptics is in the midst of AI ecology, it now has its own DSP, firmware, voice technology, AI algorithms and patents, all of which are inseparable from the hard work of Wang Qishang and his team.
Revenue is the touchstone for the value of a business company. During Wang Qishang's tenure, Synaptics' revenue soared threefold. There is no doubt about Wang's value and contribution as a business leader.
Back to AMD to bring the old home to create a brilliant graphics card
2016-2017 For two years after the official rapid development for AMD, AMD introduced the Ryzen Rui Long and Threadripper series of desktop processors, both in performance and price on the competitors pose a tremendous threat to the stock is also in the two More than 10 times during the year, the stock hit a record high of 15.65 U.S. dollars.
In the AMD graphics line, the highly anticipated Radeon RX Vega series was launched in October 2017. With its high frequency and large size, the RX Vega 64 has a super-precision floating-point budget of 13.7 TFLOPS at its highest frequency, compared to the previous generation R9 The Fury X is up 59.3%, while the 14nm FinFE process, next generation HBM2 memory, high bandwidth cache controller HBCC, 'infinity Fabric' technology, and many more are all new technologies.
But NVIDIA's rival NVIDIA's strength should not be underestimated, have released a series of flagship GTX 1080TI / Titan X / Titan V. At the end of 2017, then RTG chief architect and chief architect Raja officially leave.
At a crucial moment when the processor business is thriving and the graphics business is facing challenges, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su, a well-known doctor who appointed former AMD graphics chipmaker Wang Qi Shang, returned to AMD and commissioned RTG to develop a senior vice president Lead AMD graphics research and development of this top priority.
With Wang Qishang 25 years of experience in chip design and development as well as his once outstanding contribution, it is also at the midst of the acceptance phase of mobile Vega chip and the mid-term development of Navi chip. He hopes Wang Qishang will continue to advance the scheduled route of AMD GPU to ensure Corresponding products methodically listed, but also allow gamers around the world to use more cost-effective graphics products.
Wang Qishang whether AMD can continue to lead the recovery of lost ground? From his past performance and contribution point of view, it is very possible. I believe Wang Qishang and Mike Rayfield in collaboration with AMD, AMD will continue in the gaming, immersive and GPU computing market On the expansion of business, harvest more market revenue.
