Intel to build discrete GPUs, hires AMD’s top graphics guy to do it
One might have thought that with Monday's announcement that Intel is going to produce processors with embedded AMD GPUs, the two processor companies were on good terms. That's looking a little less likely now. On Tuesday, AMD announced that Raja Koduri, its chief GPU architect, will leave the company. Where is he going? That question was resolved on Wednesday: Intel. And what's he going to do at Intel? He's going to be the senior vice president of a new group-Core and Visual Computing-that will expand Intel's graphics reach both into the low-end, with integrated graphics reaching into the Internet-of-Things space, and more excitingly, at the high end, with discrete GPUs.
Koduri led AMD's Radeon Technologies Group, responsible for both AMD's discrete and integrated GPUs. Before that, he was director of graphics technology at Apple.
Intel has dabbled with discrete GPUs before; its 740 GPU, released in 1998, was a standalone part using the then-new AGP port. A second attempt to build a standalone GPU was the Larrabee project, but that never shipped as a GPU. In 2009, Larrabee was repositioned, with Intel deciding to make it a massively multicore accelerator-the predecessor to the current Xeon Phi chips-rather than a graphics processor.
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