Intel recruits another AMD veteran to its discrete graphics team

Intel has added another big name to its discrete graphics team. Chris Hook, the former head of AMD’s global marketing efforts, is joining Intel as its first employee directly responsible for discrete graphics marketing.

Hook will handle marketing efforts for visual technologies and discrete graphics, so he will focus on strategies for future launches of Intel’s discrete GPUs. Furthermore, even though Intel hasn’t explicitly acknowledged this, some of these discrete graphics products will reportedly be in the enthusiast gaming space.

This sets up Intel for direct competition with AMD and NVIDIA, and should put to rest any doubts about how serious Intel is about discrete graphics (despite two previous failed attempts).

The chipmaker’s announcement that it was re-entering the discrete graphics space came as a bit of a surprise earlier this year, and Hook’s Hire further fuels speculation that Intel is also looking at developing gaming GPUs.

Hook will join Raja Koduri, the former head of AMD’s Radeon Technologies Group (RTG), and Tesla’s Jim Keller at Intel. Keller was also the lead architect of AMD's Zen architecture when he was at the company, so it seems like there's quite a reunion of AMD executives going on at Intel. 

One of Hook's biggest challenges will be to shape consumer perception about Intel and gaming. Intel’s processors have good standing in the gaming space, but its integrated graphics have always been a lackluster option compared to discrete graphics or even AMD’s APUs.

If Intel does indeed push ahead with an enthusiast gaming GPU, Hook will need to successfully get consumers to associate Intel with gaming graphics, an uphill task.

Gaming aside, 46 per cent of Intel’s revenue last quarter came from its data-centric businesses, which doesn’t include desktop PCs.

However, the data center market is increasingly switching to AI-heavy workloads that can leverage GPUs and things like NVIDIA’s DXG-2 server. Having said that, it makes sense that Intel would want to decrease reliance on sales of its Xeon processors and develop GPUs for the data center as well.

Source: Tom's Hardware

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