Intel Declares War On Nvidia And AMD, Steals Radeon Head Raja Koduri

Intel has been cornering the CPU market for decades but often struggled in producing good graphics processors. Now the company has announced that it just hired Raja Koduri, who just announced quitting his position as head of AMD’s Radeon division. This is basically a declaration of war, with Intel finally having someone who could help it compete in the high-end graphics market.

Koduri became head of AMD’s Radeon Technologies Group (RTG) when it was formed roughly two years ago, Extreme Tech reports. It was basically the company’s development division of high-end GPUs. Over the last 40 days, Koduri has reportedly been on a sabbatical, which culminated in his announcement of leaving AMD.

It’s worth noting that the tech industry has been speculating Koduri’s departure for some time now. Rumors of his resignation have been circulating the web and it’s also well-known that the Vega and the Polaris GPUs have been struggling to compete with Nvidia’s GeForce 10-series cards. A lot of it had to do with the bigger brand’s immense presence, but the technological differences, while minor were apparently enough to decide the Radeon lineup’s fate.

At the same time, as if it was rehearsed, Intel announced that it was hiring the GPU veteran to become the head of its Core and Visual Computing Group. This division was formed only recently, PC World reports, and Koduri’s exact role has not yet been revealed. However, based on what the chief engineering officer at Intel, Murthy Renduchintala said, it would seem that Koduri will mostly be responsible for producing GPUs.

“We have exciting plans to aggressively expand our computing and graphics capabilities and build on our very strong and broad differentiated IP foundation,” Renduchintala said. “With Raja at the helm of our Core and Visual Computing Group, we will add to our portfolio of unmatched capabilities, advance our strategy to lead in computing and graphics, and ultimately be the driving force of the data revolution.”