"Intel is back."
At the end of last year, the 12th generation Core was released, which greatly improved the performance compared to the 11th generation, and even the energy efficiency ratio can compete with the Apple M1 MAX. Therefore, Intel's confidence is also more and more sufficient. Its CEO Pat · Pat Gelsinger not only frequently talked about winning back Apple in public, but also announced that the 12th generation Core had left AMD behind.
Technological competition is talent competition. The release of the 12th generation Core is only the prelude to Intel's heavy blows, and if you want to sit firmly in the position of chip leader, you must constantly recruit soldiers - recruit AMD's "soldiers" and buy Apple's "horses".
The competition is not stopping, and the recruitment is not stopping
Recently, it was reported that AMD Independent GPU Chief SoC Architect Rohit · Rohit Verma will be transferred to Intel and entrusted with a heavy responsibility. Previously, he worked for Intel for 15 years, working on SoC architecture, and this time he returned to his old club.
Rohit · Wilma left AMD in 2013 and has served as head architect for semi-custom business units, SoC architect for standalone GPU chips, and has worked on projects in market segments such as games, cloud games, consumer-grade products, and workstations. Now that he has returned to Intel, he will still be responsible for the design of standalone GPU chips.
Coincidentally, Apple's M1 chip design director Jeff Jeff Wilcox also received an olive branch from Intel.
During his tenure at Apple, he built the M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max series chips for Apple, and was the main leader of Apple's M1 development team. Arguably, Jeff Wilcock was one of the key figures apples were able to compete with Intel in the desktop CPU space.
Interestingly, Wilcock's old club is also Intel.
He has been with Intel since 1997, became chief architect at Nvidia 10 years later, returned to Intel in 2010, and joined Apple three years later as Director of System Architecture for Mac.
He once left Intel, and also left with Rohit · Verma is the same as the road of "first go and then return".
In addition to the above two, Intel has also poached a number of technical experts from AMD.
In September 2021, Intel poached two major players from AMD, Steve Bell, who has worked at AMD for 13 years, and Ritche Corpus, who has worked for 15 years, who are mainly responsible for graphics card software and game cooperation business.
In October of the same year, Vineet Goel, a vice president of technology at AMD, joined Intel as vice president, general manager of GPU architecture and IP engineering, and was responsible for planning the Xe GPU IP roadmap.
Obviously, Kirsinger, the current CEO of Intel with a technical background, understands very well that "the competition of the 21st century is, in the final analysis, the competition for talent."
Job hopping, the traditional skill of Silicon Valley bigwigs
Digging people, other technology giants have not bothered to think less.
Apple, for example, in addition to poaching Jeff from Intel In addition to Wilcock, Apple also transferred ARM chief architect Mike Wilshire in 2019. Mike Filippo was under his command.
Previously, Mike Filippo led the development of the Cortex-A76, Cortex-A72, Cortex-A57, and ARM's upcoming 7nm+ and 5nm chips, and is also the chief architect of the third-generation A76 and Zeus CPUs already planned and developed. Similarly, before Mike Filippo also has experience working at AMD and Intel.
According to the latest news, Mike Filippo also intends to jump ship again, developing processors for Microsoft for cloud computing services and surface series of PC servers.
The chip industry needs a lot of money and talent, so that the incident of "digging the wall" between enterprises will occur frequently.
In addition to the eagerness of companies to seek talents, Silicon Valley's resolute opposition to the employment environment of non-compete agreements is also the key to their "repeated jumps".
Most state laws in the United States support non-compete agreements, but California is an exception that does not recognize and enforce non-compete agreements after leaving employment. Thanks to this, high-tech talents have been able to flow freely among the major technology giants in Silicon Valley without legal concerns, and thus form the "mobile culture" of Silicon Valley.
Former Apple well-known CPU architect Jim Jim Keller is a prime example. He joined AMD in 1998 as Lead Architect for the AMD K8 microarchitecture. Jim 2008 Keller joined Apple and led the launch of Apple's first self-developed chip, A4, helping Apple lay the foundation for self-developed CPUs.
Jim · Keller
Four years later he returned to AMD to develop a new generation of x86-64 and ARM microarchitectures (Zen and K12) that helped AMD out of its trough.
In 2016, he moved to Tesla to be responsible for the architectural design of AI chips, and soon after jumped from Tesla to Intel.
Job hopping is usually accompanied by high salaries, but it is undeniable that for the successful technical giants, no matter which giant company they are in, the career prospects will not be bad, and frequent job hopping is more like "I beat myself" alone.
For Intel, this is one of the reasons why it has been defeated in the past, and now it is also a strong support for it to fight back against other giants.
Produced by ZAKER Technology
Wen / Liu Fan Intern Liang Yupeng