Raja Koduri, the head of Intel's Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics, has been promoted to the position of Executive Vice President, according to an internal company memo seen by The Register. Penned by Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger on Tuesday, the memo acclaimed Koduri for his numerous contributions to the company over the past four years.
During the last four years, the division headed by Koduri has pushed Intel's GPU capabilities well past those of the company's integrated graphics. He was also exceptionally positioned to do so: Koduri moved to Intel directly from his role as head of arch-rival AMD's own Radeon Technologies Group, which has developed these types of accelerators for decades.
This promotion follows Raja Koduri's work in essentially rebuilding Intel's graphics division to position it for the high-stakes, multi-billion-dollar market of high performance GPUs in the last four years. That effort has, for now, culminated with the launch of Intel's Arc A350M and A370M discrete GPUs, mobile-oriented graphics cards that are the slowest of Intel's complete Arc Alchemist lineup.
While Intel's Arc performance so far hasn't been as good as the company initially hoped, its chances of ever doing so were miniscule from the outset. There's a reason only AMD and NVIDIA provide GPU accelerators for HPC. GPUs are some of the biggest, most complex pieces of silicon that ever come out of the world's leading foundries. AMD's only other competitor in this space, Nvidia, has a market capitalization that's twice as high as that of even giant Intel. The stakes are immense.
In the internal memo, Pat Gelsinger wrote that the world could now count on a third player in the high-performance GPU game, a critical segment for Intel's growth. The CEO lauded the execution on Intel's multi-generation roadmap for its Xe high-performance GPUs, spinning it as a pivotal technology for the enablement of the so-called Metaverse and Zetta-scale supercomputing.
Intel knows (or at least estimates) the ultimate performance if its upcoming graphics products better than anyone. As such, Koduri's promotion bodes well for the future GPU market. And that market looks much better divided by three players, at least for us consumers. Arc Alchemist may not be as potent as the competing solutions from AMD and Nvidia, especially once Nvidia's Ada and AMD's RDNA 3 architectures launch later this year, but it will hopefully serve as the springboard for significantly better architectures with the future Battlemage, Celestial, and Druid architectures.
