Intel's latest talent acquisition from rival AMD, as it builds a GPU product lineup, is Masooma Bhaiwala. "After 15+ amazing years at AMD, I have decided to take on a different opportunity... It was a truly fun ride, with an incredible team, during which we built some truly cool chips," she wrote in a LinkedIn post. According to her profile, Bhaiwala takes the role of Vice President, discrete GPU SoCs, and works under Intel's Graphics and Throughput Computing Hardware Engineering group headed by Raja Koduri.

Koduri's team has been a glassdoor for former AMD executives and tech-leads. While it has hired engineering talent such as Balaji Kanigicherla, Kalyan Thumaty and Joseph Facca; it has simultaneously lost client-graphics marketing talent, with the likes of Chris Hook, Heather Lennon, and Jon Carvill waltzing out of the company in less than a year of their association. Besides Koduri's Intel's most priced tech talent acquisition is Jim Keller, who is working on a future high-IPC CPU core design for the company. While working for AMD, Keller's "Zen" microarchitecture coupled with CEO Lisa Su's leadership have scripted one of the biggest turnarounds in Silicon Valley.

Will Intel even make client-segment gaming discrete GPUs now? Because the GPU marketing gurus Intel snatched from AMD to sell them, Chris Hook and Heather Lennon, are reportedly no longer with the company. The two are on their way to an unnamed startup. This, according to a sensational Charlie Demerjian report citing company sources. These exits closely follow that of another valuable chip marketing honcho, John Carvill, who joined Austin-based startup Nuvia, which is designing ASICs and SoCs for the data-center of the future.

Hook and Lennon were responsible for the PR dexterity AMD RTG enjoyed through its ups and downs this decade. With RTG head Raja Koduri leaving for Intel to head its GPU development project, his former comrades at RTG soon followed. The flight of GPU marketing talent out of Intel at this stage could be the first of many hints that Intel has made a big decision with regards to how it plans to monetize Raja's work. "Ponte Vecchio" is Intel's ambitious GPU compute processor designed primarily for HPC and AI workloads. There's tumbleweed coming out of Intel on "Arctic Sound" since Q2-2019, a contraption that more closely resembles graphics cards as you know it.

Darren McPhee worked 12 years for ATI and AMD. When he left AMD in 2015, he was one of the company's top marketing managers. For the last three years he has worked for various companies, but the surprise has come with Intel recruiting him to occupy the position of Product Marketing Manager in its 'Discrete Graphics' group, one of the most interesting initiatives in the recent times.

This division is working hard to develop a new family of discrete graphics cards that will theoretically compete with AMD and NVIDIA solutions. Intel has been steadily growing, and in fact Intel already signed Raja Koduri, AMD GPU architect, in November 2017. This firm has been attracting more and more talent from an AMD: Koduri was followed by Jim Keller, Ryzen Architect, and Chris Hook, who led AMD's Radeon Technologies Group Marketing Departmen prior to his move to Intel. These hires certainly make it clear that Intel is taking an increasingly promising project very seriously. We will have to be patient, however, because the firm already indicated in SIGGRAPH 18 that it will have its first models ready in 2020.

Intel's Chris Hook (there's something strange there) said in a conversation with r/Hardware's moderator dylan522p that the company is still planning on adding support for VESA's Adaptive Sync (also known as AMD's own FreeSync branding) in Intel GPUs. To put this in perspective, Intel is the single largest player in the overall graphics market; their integrated solutions mean they have the highest graphics accelerator share in the market, even against AMD and NVIDIA - and Intel hasn't even entered the discrete graphics market - yet.

It makes sense that the blue giant would be pursuing this option - royalty-free frame syncing beats developing a proprietary alternative. A quick thought-exercise could point towards NVIDIA's G-Sync being rendered irrelevant with such strong support from the industry.

Right in time for SIGGRAPH, the world's leading conference for computer graphics, the people around Raja Koduri and Chris Hook have posted a video on Twitter, which shows a teaser for their upcoming graphics cards, that are scheduled to become available in 2020.The video is produced in a style that's typical for what Chris Hook has been releasing at AMD, too. It starts with a history lesson, praising Intel's achievements in the graphics department, and then continues to promise that in 2020, Intel discrete graphics cards "will be set free, and that's just the beginning".

In the comments for the video, Chris Hook, who left AMD to join Intel as head of marketing for their graphics department said: "Will take time and effort to be the first successful entrant into the dGPU segment in 25 years, but we have some incredible talent at Intel, and above all, a passion for discrete graphics."

You can find the video here.

Chris Hook, the head of marketing at AMD Radeon Technologies Group (RTG), who resigned from AMD a few weeks ago, joined Intel. Hook will hold the position of head of discrete graphics marketing, confirming rumors of Intel making heavy investments into the development of a discrete GPU that can double up as a super-scalar processor, enabling the company to compete with NVIDIA and AMD for slices of the AI and blockchain computing gold-rush, with PC gaming as a fallback market. Jim Keller, Raja Koduri, and Chris Hook make up key names from AMD to have joined Intel in recent times. Keller was the lead architect of AMD "Zen," who after a brief stint at Tesla, joined Intel earlier this month.

After Raja Koduri left AMD in a low-profile-turned-high-profile leave of absence, ending up as head for rival Intel's newly formed Core and Visual Computing Group, now it's time for another high-level player to leave the company. AMD's Chris Hook has been in the company for almost two decades, rising from the bottom up towards the enviable position (at times) to lead the entire AMD's Radeon Technologies' Group Marketing Department since October 2017.

In a Facebook post detailing his departure, Hook joked that when he first joined the company, "ATI still had a smoking room, there was only one TV in the office (a small 14" black and white version we crowded into a room to watch 9/11 on), transistor size was still measured in microns, and 320x240 was considered 'high res'." Chris Hook has led (or been in the next closest position) as the public-facing effort of ATI/AMD-RTG and AMD core marketing team for a while now, so him leaving the company at a time where the global GPU marketshare is better than it ever has been in years does give some food for thought. Some publications are speculating on a move from AMD to Intel, similar to Raja Koduri's, citing close relationships between both men and the need for Intel to eventually market some products originating from their Core and Visual Computing Group (maybe with Arctic Sound?)

In an interview, AMD's Chris Hook justified Vega's delayed release due to a wish to increase available stock for gamers who want to purchase the new high-performance architecture by AMD. In an interview with HardOCP, Chris Hook had this to say:

"Part of the reason it's taken us a little longer to launch Vega - and I'll be honest about that - is that we wanted to make sure we were launching with good volume. (...) Obviously we've got to compensate for things like coin-miners, they're going to want to get their hands on these. We believe we're launching with a volume that will ensure that gamers can get their hands on them, and that's what's important to us."

It appears that AMD tried their best to increase production and stock volumes so as to mitigate price fluctuations upon Vega's entry to the market due to above normal demand from cryptocurrency miners. The jury is still out on whether Vega will be an option for mining due to its exquisite architecture, however. Still, this sounds as good a reason as any to delay Vega for as long as it has been already. Just a few more days until we see what AMD managed with this one, folks. Check the video after the break.