AMD’s Head Of Graphics Just Joined Intel

It’s been a real crazy week in the GPU world.

Earlier this week, we wrote about one of the bigger surprises in the PC gaming/tech world: the fact that AMD and Intel, storied rivals in the CPU space, were teaming up to build products that would directly challenge NVIDIA’s stranglehold on the mobile GPU market.

[referenced url=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/11/amd-and-intel-are-teaming-up-to-take-on-nvidia/” thumb=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2017/11/2017-11-07_084356-410×231.jpg” title=”AMD And Intel Are Teaming Up To Take On NVIDIA” excerpt=”It’s been a whirlwind year in the PC market, in no small part thanks to the return of AMD. But things just got a whole lot more insane of late, with AMD and Intel – of all companies – announcing a partnership.”]

If you want a gaming laptop, or anything that requires a bit more performance than an integrated GPU, you’ll end up with a NVIDIA card. That’s the state of the market right now, and it makes sense that Intel and AMD want a bigger piece of it.

But as it turns out, that wasn’t the biggest move this week had in store.

Earlier this week, AMD’s chief GPU architect and head of the Radeon Technologies Group, Raja Koduri, resigned. Koduri’s position made him responsible for the recent Vega line of GPUs (as pictured above), as well as the graphics tech in AMD’s APUs, semi-custom offerings (like those found in consoles) and GPU compute tech.

Obviously, his departure is no small matter. Especially since his next job is at Intel, leading a brand new department: the Core and Visual Computing Group.

Which will be creating their own discrete GPUs.

“In this position, Koduri will expand Intel’s leading position in integrated graphics for the PC market with high-end discrete graphics solutions for a broad range of computing segments,” Intel’s release confirmed.

It’s a huge move by Intel, although the process of manufacturing a discrete GPU from scratch takes years. At least three to four, really, especially since Intel’s only efforts of late have been the integrated solutions within their CPUs.

And for the interim, boosting the performance of Intel’s integrated offerings might be a more pressing issue. Intel already pushed out an updated driver for their integrated GPUs this week, boosting performance in games like Middle-earth: Shadow of War, Destiny 2, Call of Duty WW2 and Divinity: Original Sin 2.

I don’t know who would actually play any of those games on an integrated GPU – especially Shadow of War, I mean, come on – but the fact that Intel is actively working on that is an indication that improved gaming performance is certainly on the radar. Not just in the integrated market, either.


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