Intel's Arc discrete graphics will soon be on sale, and behind this, there is a huge personnel change.
"The brain drain [situation] has changed and now talent is back." At last week's press conference, Intel CEO said.
The returning talent is Rohit Verma, the chief architect of the previous AMD Radeon discrete graphics card.
Rohit Verma Ho Man
Although Rohit Verma was poached by Intel, it is also a return in another sense.
Rohit Verma, a former chief SoC architect at Intel, began working at Intel in 1999 and moved to AMD in 2013.
According to LinkedIn, Verma worked as an AMD Researcher and Lead SoC Architect in the Semi-Custom Business Unit before becoming an AMD Independent GPU Senior Fellow and Chief SoC Architect.
Now, after 9 years, Verma has jumped back to the "old club" again.
In addition, Verma and Intel's current CEO Pat Kissinger are still "old comrades-in-arms", and the two work at Intel overlap very much.
Kissinger joined Intel 20 years before Verma and became Intel's first CTO in 2001. Verma can be said to be his "old subordinate".
Since becoming CEO last year, Kissinger has brought many of his "old team" members back to Intel.
Intel poached two GPU talent
Rohit Verma is also the second executive to lose to AMD's GPU division. Raja Koduri, who previously led Radeon's division, moved to Intel in 2017 as Chief Architect and Senior Vice President of the latter's Visual Computing Business Group.
Led by Koduri, Intel introduced the Arc family of consumer GPUs.
No wonder that after this Rohit Verma jumped ship, it was called Raja 2.0 by netizens.
Intel's frequent digging of competitors has upset AMD fans, who believe that AMD should sign non-compete agreements with employees to prevent talent from jumping ship to rivals.
Rohit Verma's return to Intel could help Intel execute the Arc GPU roadmap and potentially attract other GPU talent to Intel.
The fact that competitors are poaching each other is a major feature of market competition, but it is still detrimental to AMD. AMD's recent market cap has caught up with Intel, but Intel clearly has more capital to invest in talent.
Some netizens believe that the future of AMD does not seem to be very good, Intel's new CEO has a positive style and rich experience in technology, which is not a small threat to AMD.
In short, the future graphics battle between Intel and AMD has a lot to look forward to.
Source: Qubits