Intel Discrete Graphics Boss Raja Koduri was the former head of graphics architecture at AMD and while there has been a lot of speculation regarding why he left AMD, Koduri himself has not said much regarding the matter, until now.
Intel Discrete Graphics Boss Raja Koduri has finally broken the silence and talked about why he left AMD and joined Intel. He mentioned that he thought about the best way to use his next 10 years and he thought that the amount of data that is being produced right now is too much for us to analyze, understand, and process. This is one of the reasons why he took a break from AMD before he left, as he wanted to figure out what he wanted to do next.
He mentioned that new technologies would need to be invented in order to keep up with the data explosion. The following is what he had to say in this regard:
As I was thinking through that and the elements that are required, the core pieces of technology required, and which company has these assets, these people, these resources, the only company that checked my list…was Intel,
This answer is a bit vague and he did not mention what Intel had at that time which was not available at AMD. We do know that Intel is a much bigger company and has resources that AMD does not have but back then AMD was in the graphics market as well as the CPU market, unlike Intel which did not make consumer graphics cards.
It was after Raja Koduri joined Intel that the company announced that it was working on a discrete graphics solution. Raja Koduri further went on to mention the following:
I want to set the record straight that Intel has a world class design team sitting here. What I’m doing is helping them figure out how to build products that scale up from the low power, mobile domain up to petaflops—the big data center GPUs,
Intel does have some of the best people working at the company and it is constantly hiring new talent as well as industry veterans so Raja’s statement is not surprising. AMD has been able to put up an impressive fight when it comes to the CPU market and I hope that the same can be said about AMD Navi when those graphics cards come out.
Let us know what you think about Intel Discrete Graphics Boss Raja Koduri’s statement and why you think he left AMD.
