Intel Poaches Top AMD GPU Architect to Lead Xe Development

After radically changing its approach to GPUs and hiring Raja Koduri in 2017, Intel has been rather aggressively hiring GPU engineers from various companies in general and from Raja Koduri's former company, AMD, in particular. Last month the company poached Vineet Goel, a graphics technology veteran from AMD.

At Intel, Vineet Goel will serve as Vice President and General Manager of Xe GPU Architecture and IP Engineering at Intel and will be responsible for development of the company's Xe architectures. An Intel spokesperson confirmed to CRN that Goel will head a group of architects and engineers that will be 'architecting, designing and verifying Intel’s Xe IP road map.' Since the first two or three Xe architecture generations have already been defined (or at least named) Goel will have an impact on Intel's Xe GPUs that are years down the road. 

Vineet Goel is has had quite a career in the graphics industry. Most recently he served as Corporate Vice President of GPU Architecture at AMD and before that (from August 2016 to June 2019) was responsible for GPU architecture development at the company. Given the timeline, Vineet Goel played a key role in development of AMD's latest RDNA and RDNA 2 as well as CDNA and CDNA 2 architectures. Furthermore, he also contributed strongly to development of upcoming RDNA 3 and CDNA 3 architectures as well as their successors.

Goel he started his career at Real3D in the late 1990s and continued it at ATI Technologies Orlando division after Real3D was sold to Intel in 1999. He worked at ATI and then at AMD till 2011, when he joined his former colleague Eric Demers at Qualcomm and worked on ultra-low-power Adreno GPUs for Snapdragon system-on-chips. He spent about five years at Qualcomm and then re-joined AMD in mid-2016.

Over his career Goel was granted dozens of graphics related patents, but avid readers might remember him for his work on ATI's TruForm and other tessellation technologies (for Microsoft's Xbox 360, ATI's Terascale/Terascale 2 architectures) supported by the company's GPUs over the years. His more recent inventions include FidelityFX Super Resolution, multi-instance GPUs, and chiplet-based machine learning accelerators. 

Vineet Goel is a yet another ex-AMD graphics engineer or executive that Intel has hired in the recent years. The company has also hired multiple people from Nvidia. Among Intel's noteworthy hires in the recent years are  Masooma Bhaiwala, Tom Petersen, Jon Carvill, Antal Tungler, Darren McPhee, Devon Nekechuk, Damien Triolet, and many others. Intel also recently boosted its game developers relations team with four highly-experienced executives.