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Pemalite on 09 November 2017
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JEMC said:

Huge news, guys:

 

Intel to Develop Discrete GPUs, Hires Raja Koduri as Chief Architect & Senior VP
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12017/intel-to-develop-discrete-gpus-hires-raja-koduri-as-chief-architect
On Monday, Intel announced that it had penned a deal with AMD to have the latter provide a discrete GPU to be integrated onto a future Intel SoC. On Tuesday, AMD announced that their chief GPU architect, Raja Koduri, was leaving the company. Now today the saga continues, as Intel is announcing that they have hired Raja Koduri to serve as their own GPU chief architect. And Raja's task will not be a small one; with his hire, Intel will be developing their own high-end discrete GPUs.

Starting from the top and following yesterday’s formal resignation from AMD, Raja Koduri has jumped ship to Intel, where he will be serving as a Senior VP for the company, overseeing the new Core and Visual Computing group. As a chief architect and general manager, Intel is tasking Raja with significantly expanding their GPU business, particularly as the company re-enters the discrete GPU field. Raja of course has a long history in the GPU space as a leader in GPU architecture, serving as the manager of AMD’s graphics business twice, and in between AMD stints serving as the director of graphics architecture on Apple’s GPU team.

 

I'm sure there's a lot of angry people at AMD right now.

There were some rumors that there was some infighting awhile back at the AMD Radeon Technology Group.
So this could be the remnants of that. (Or not. Rumors, salt and grains and all that.)

I highly doubt Intel will actually be competitive in the gaming space.
If anyone remembers from the i740 days... Outside of the pathetic performance... Intel had one massive caveat.
Drivers. They were terrible, not only were they fairly buggy and under-featured, but Intel just didn't support them over the long term.

AMD and nVidia have spent years improving their drivers to the point where they have more lines of code than the Windows kernel.
It's not going to be quick or easy for Intel to make inroads into the gaming space, that's for sure.

AMD and nVidia have also been working with a ton of Publishers/Developers for a massive amount of years, so they have industry connections on their side to leverage.

haxxiy said:

Why should they? It was a good riddance. Given the timeframe Raja was hired by AMD, maybe Fiji but surely both Polaris and Vega, the worst GPUs AMD developed since before the Terascale days, are his brainchildren. I have this theory he's an Nvidia undercover agent, since they are the ones who benefited the most from Raja's tenure over RTG.

Of course, to the company who developed Larrabee and Iris Graphics, Vega must look like a shining standard, so yeah.

Nah. I don't think we can blame him for Polaris and Vega.

AMD's first mistake was bringing the Radeon Group under the CPU development house, integrating the Radeon team to push their Fusion initiative... Their GPU division then seemed to stagnate for a long time.
It was only a few years back that AMD spun off the Radeon Group so it would become a separate entity once again... Sadly GPU designs are in the development pipeline for many many years... Thus we haven't seen the fruits of that change just yet.
Plus another aspect is that AMD had to spin off allot of engineers, staff and other workers to try and get profitable over the years, that's also had an effect on their R&D.

Also, Vega and Polaris are decent parts and very efficient parts. Just not at the clockrates and voltages AMD is pushing.

Hopefully in a few more years we will see the Radeon group turn things around for the better.

Last edited by Pemalite - on 09 November 2017

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