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.