Intel Recruits AMD RTG Exec Raja Koduri To Head New Visual Computing Group (hothardware.com)

MojoKid writes: Intel just announced that former AMD Radeon Technologies Group SVP, Raja Koduri, would be joining its team to head up a newly formed Core and Visual Computing Group, and as a general manager of a new initiative to drive edge and client visual computing solutions. With Koduri's help, Intel plans to unify and expand its IP across multiple segments including core computing, graphics, media, imaging and machine learning capabilities for the client and data center segments, artificial intelligence, and emerging opportunities. Intel also explicitly stated that it would also expand its strategy to develop and deliver high-end, discrete graphics solutions. This announcement also comes just after Intel revealed it would be employing AMD's Vega GPU architecture in a new mobile processor that will drive high-end graphics performance into smaller, slimmer, and sleeker mobile form factors. With AMD essentially spinning the Radeon Technologies Group into its own entity, Intel now leveraging AMD graphics technology, and a top-level executive like Koduri responsible for said graphics tech switching teams, we have to wonder how the relationship between Intel and AMD's RTG with evolve.

Comments

Good

[war4peace]

This oughta be interesting.
I don't think Intel wants to get into the end-user discrete GPUs. Rather they want a piece of the computing and deep learning market that nVidia started dominating as of late.

Re: Good

[Anonymous Coward]

This oughta be interesting.
I don't think Intel wants to get into the end-user discrete GPUs. Rather they want a piece of the computing and deep learning market that nVidia started dominating as of late.

Intel has tried to enter every market imaginable for the last 20 years and spectacularly failed every single time.

In 3-4 years Slashdot will proudly break the 'news' of the redundancies.

Re: Good

[darkain]

Exactly this. Intel attempts to take over a market, fails, and then simply partners with the market leader after bowing out of their own product lines. I just witnessed this happen with Intel IoT. They discontinued their entire IoT lines, and are now partnering with Arduino. Now they're doing the same thing with the GPU segment!

Re:Good

[klingens]

nvidia already tried to establish a CPU line, and they failed just as hard as Intel did with discrete graphics, twice.
ARM can maybe surplant Intel x86, but nvidia will not, imho. nvidia moved on to other pastures, like self driving car computing where their shaders matter and their CPU tech is not really relevant.

Re: Good

[The Cynical Critic]

I think your information about the Arduino partnership is a bit out of date here... They had a few Arduino-compatible boards/products that came out of a partnership with the company, but they weren't what you'd want to call a roaring success so Intel scaled back the IoT business in a major way few months ago. Laid off 140 people and moved how knows how many people to work on different things while doing that.

Re: Good

[retina17]

http://sportscentre4u.com/

Re:Good

[war4peace]

If anything you should blame the British.

Re:Good

[AHuxley]

A move to the low cost gpu away from many selling more cpu's?
The tradition solution to most computer graphics problems was to pay for more a lot more Intel CPU's.

Re:Good

[Hognoxious]

If the Irish bred quick enough we could have brought them in to do the actual work and just wiped out the natives, but India is like *big* and even their far-famed fecundity wasn't sufficient. Plus they can't go outside in the sun.

Though I hear it's been tried successfully in some places.

Is every single IT person in management in the USA

[Anonymous Coward]

..... a fucking Indian ???

Serious question. Every second name here seems to be "Sanjeet".

Re:Is every single IT person in management in the

[mattr]

What do you expect when you fail to promote intellectual achievement and instead promote thug culture, fundamentalist anti-evolution schools and finally a thuggish president? It isn't a problem that the person's name is Indian. Rather it indicates that less of the families who don't have Indian names worked on educating their kids. You want a football culture, you got it. Personally, you bigotted oaf.

I know what they can call it

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD could call the graphics spin off ATI

Re: Is every single IT person in management in the

[Anonymous Coward]

Companies like Infosys have been sued for refusing to hire non-Indians. Why study IT as an American when you will just be undercut by a cheap Indian H1B worker? Cancel the H1B system and you will see more Americans in tech, simple.

Re:Is every single IT person in management in the

[Billly Gates]

When you outsource your whole IT department early last decade all you find are Indians to promote. Especially true due to a lack of American talent as the previous ones became truck drivers before they could be promoted.

It's really bad in Silicon Valley. After an IPO the white Americans leave for another startup to cash up and cheap outsourced Indians come in to replace them. Look at the bugs in Windows, Oracle, VMWARE workstation after large numbers of developers have been replaced with cheaper alternatives

PRECISELY what I had predicted! IT'S A TRAP!

[Anonymous Coward]

Only a few stories down, I said how this whole thing is a huge trap! Just like every time before. Because that's how Intel is.

I literally talked about how Intel will hire away key people at AMD, to keep it small, [just sheer of killing the company].
And how it's the same tactic that Microsoft is so infamous for. (Among several others.)

The GPU integration thing is just the first step in Embrace-Extend-Extinguish.
This is for step 2 (he will do the extending) and step 3, when Intel will have made its "own" Radeon GPUs, right before telling AMD to fuck off and die.
It will not have any benefits for AMD. Only that nobody will buy Zen CPUs anymore. (Together with a few other factors, like Intel keeping its prices temporarily low.)

Re:PRECISELY what I had predicted! IT'S A TRAP!

[Anonymous Coward]

Or it will be like previous Intel efforts, where its a 'me too!' project (in this case to win the mythical IoT HD gfx market, gamers, and crypto-miners). It will take Intel at least 3 years to get to the market with their first effort, which will be only marginally better than the previous effort, it will be sold to Server board integrators, and eventually abandoned or spun into a separate product with 'learnings' from this.

We must have our own failure !

[Laxator2]

I can hear the Intel executives talking.

"AMD has had its failure in the graphics chip market, and we did not. We cannot be left behind on this one!"

"We must have our own failure !"

Will they call the new graphic chip i740 ?

Re:Is every single IT person in management in the

[The Cynical Critic]

Those are some pretty heavy handed generalizations you're making there... Being a bigoted oaf in response to a bigoted oaf really doesn't do much other than make yourself look just as bad as them.

Mind you, I'm not American so I have no stake in this personally, but in my experience this generalization really doesn't apply white people who work in the tech sector and at least on the executive level whites still hold about 70% of positions (which incidentally is almost the percentage of whites in the U.S population). As for other groups asians do hold a disproportionately large percentage of tech sector executive positions (about 20% for about 5% of the population) while the remaining 10% is shared by blacks and hispanics+lationos (about 13 and 16% of the population respectively).

Won't speculate as to the reasons why, but your bigoted generalization really doesn't seem to hold any water.

Re:Is every single IT person in management in the

[Gravis Zero]

Those are some pretty heavy handed generalizations you're making there... Being a bigoted oaf in response to a bigoted oaf really doesn't do much other than make yourself look just as bad as them.

Is your response really, "you aren't properly representing bigots"?

Re:Is every single IT person in management in the

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect that's more the 'continuous release with no maintenance branch' mentality taking hold.

I would even say in my experience is more the fault of spoiled developers who aren't forced to do things they find boring, like maintenance releases of 'old' software, or waiting to deliver some feature they are really excited about and dealing with QA that says it's not ready.

I can't speak to vmware or oracle products, but Windows is certainly full steam ahead on this.

Re:Non-compete agreement ?

[Guppy]

Usually at these levels people are forbidden from working for a direct competitor for up to 5 years. Possibly AMD agreed not to sue Intel for poaching in exchange for Intel using AMD graphics chips in their APUs.

Non-compete agreements are generally not enforceable in California. Both Intel and AMD's headquarters are in California, and Raja apparently lives there as well.

winners and losers

[Elixon]

Intel graphics sux... we all know that. But now we will get used to Intel chips being really good in graphics... and in a year or two when you will be buying your next Intel CPU you won't bother to ask (as an average customer) if it is AMD chip on the die or Intel's own... and I bet it will soon be again Intel.

Double hit - get the quick GPU reputation fix thanks to AMD and ready own GPU (to replace AMD in the future) by stealing top engineer from AMD. Not a good move for AMD! IMO earning few bucks from Intel will come too costly for AMD.