Update, 04/11/18, 12:35 pm PT: AMD responded with news of Chris Hook's replacement. Original publication, 4/11/18, 10:30am PT, with updates:
Chris Hook, AMD's Sr. Director of Global Product Marketing, has announced that he is leaving the company after a 17-year tenure that began with ATI. Hook is responsible for global marketing of a wide range of AMD's products, including Ryzen, Radeon, and Radeon Pro.
Hook made the announcement via his Facebook account and is headed to a new unspecified role that begins at the end of April, but he didn't specify the nature of his new role. Raja Koduri recently left AMD for Intel, and given the long working relationship between the two, speculation will run rampant that Hook will head to Intel to help Koduri with Intel's discrete GPU initiative.
AMD recently appointed two new heads of its Radeon Technologies Group, so Hook's replacement will also be a source of speculation in the coming weeks. In either case, we won't know more details about his destination until later this month. Meanwhile, we've reached out to AMD/Radeon for comment.
EDIT: AMD responded with news of Hook's replacement:
Sasa Marinkovic, Director, Radeon Software Marketing will be taking leadership of AMD Product and Content Marketing. Over his twenty years career at AMD, Sasa has successfully launched several generations of disruptive AMD products and will be responsible for the introduction of the next generation of AMD’s Ryzen and Radeon products. In addition, Chris Hook has left AMD to pursue other opportunities. We thank Chris for his many contributions and wish him well in the next stage of his career.
Here's Hook's statement from Facebook:
Hi Everyone,As some of you know, I made the decision recently to leave AMD to pursue a new role outside the company (which I start at the end of April).AMD has been a great company to work for, and I owe a tremendous amount to them both professionally and personally. Changing jobs was an incredibly hard decision to make since I’ve been with AMD/ATI since I was still in my late 20s, which is so long ago that ATI still had a smoking room, there was only one TV in the office (a small 14” black and white version we crowded into a room to watch 9/11 on), transistor size was still measured in microns, and 320x240 was considered ‘high res’.The most rewarding experience I had at AMD was reigniting Radeon over the past couple of years with Radeon Technologies Group, growing its market share from high teens to low thirties, and achieving a record revenue quarter late last year. It was a ton of work, but I’ve never had so much fun, visited so many great places, or worked with such amazing people.I’m also incredibly grateful to the tech press, who have been my second family for the past couple of decades, and I’ll always remember our adventures in places like Tunis, Iceland, Macau, Ibiza and the USS Hornet, to name a few. I hope there will be more of that one day. I’ll fill you all in on my new opportunity in the coming days and weeks. In the mean time, I’m going to enjoy a few days of vacation where I don’t have to be constantly checking a work smart phone to see what’s going on back in the office (that hasn’t happened since I got my first Blackberry in 2002). Cheers,Chris
