Intel promotes Raja Koduri to executive vice president as the company gets ready to fight NVIDIA and AMD for a piece of the GPU market
Intel poached Raja from AMD back in 2017 (an exclusive story I leaked) and since then he has quietly been working on Intel’s GPU ambitions. With weeks leading up to the ARC discrete GPU launch, giving Raja even more executive powers (although to be fair, Raja was calling the shots from the start) will allow Intel to be just that much more agile when navigating the GPU market.
— Pat Gelsinger (@PGelsinger) April 19, 2022 Considering Raja previously headed Radeon Technologies Group (AMD’s business unit that dealt with GPUs), this is an extremely befitting title and will likely come with Intel investing more money into the discrete GPUs once the proof-of-concept in the shape of ARC launches. Intel is probably the only company in the world that has 1) the pockets and 2) the cross-licensing agreements on critical GPU IP to take the fight to AMD/NVIDIA and attempt to beat them on their own game. XeSS is one such example - which came out of the gates swinging and is expected to have a visual quality that matches (or even exceeds) DLSS 2.X. Intel’s flagship GPU product, Ponte Vecchio, is also supposed to be released this year - although due to the ongoing industry crunch and shortage of allocations at TSMC - there is a chance this will get pushed back. It’s also not just the technology that Raja has helped change at Intel - it’s the culture as well. At any rate, CEO Gelsinger appears to be very pleased with Raja’s performance and we should expect to see great things come out of the graphics group in the next couple of years. In just a few years, when you see the potential impact of advances like XeSS and future ARC GPUs (Battlemage/Celestial etc), it is starting to look increasingly likely - that the era of the discrete GPU duopoly is well and truly over.
