Intel graphics chief Raja Koduri leaves after five years battling Nvidia and AMD
theverge.com
theverge.com
like, the people actually in the room with him don't seem that impressed. see the testimonials about his service at intel from his boss:
https://i.imgur.com/hrVfr8G.png
https://i.imgur.com/LTfYvLi.png
list of good things about raja's time here: it has come to an end. also, we are excited to announce our cafeteria "bring your own fruit to work" program will be extended throughout the week.
dude was a fuckup at AMD too, and honestly Terascale was a mess in the early days too despite eventually being cleaned up later. Once AMD sidelined Raja onto Vega and refocused onto RDNA, they started succeeding again. And all anyone ever says is "you didn't give him long enough".
https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd-sony-ps5-navi-affected-vega
He's been at Intel for five and a half years, close to 6 years. This is his baby, he ran it start to finish and it's still a mess.
He may or may not have been a great engineer (maybe he wasn't the talent on those teams and/or there were more people able to tell him no, or tone it down and work with him to develop his ideas) but either way he rose to the level of his incompetence and finally found someone who wouldn't let him fail upwards in the management track.
MLID is MLID but in this same video he basically dropped that his sources are now saying battlemage and celestial are cut down to a single small die for each generation, basically a tech demonstrator to let them keep working on it, and my guess is it's going to have all the fanfare of Cannon Lake or DG1 - these will be buried, they will serve as milestones not serious revenue products. And while druid still is slated for a full launch, that's a long way off (almost 5 years) and one can assume that if the GPU teams don't catch traction, the whole thing is going into the trash can and intel goes back to making display adapters. And none of that is particularly surprising other than, again, that they're even continuing at this at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzV1RS5Oc6I
having your division broken into two and reorg'd into more successful units with a track record of successful execution and then having (full) revenue release of its products pushed back 5 years (during a company-wide financial crisis) so that the whole thing can be done over by someone more competent is not done lightly, this is really extraordinary, and it's remarkable that the whole thing isn't canceled. frankly it's likely a testimonial to how much of this is Raja's fault that Intel is giving some other people a crack at this.
Charlie Demerjian thinks this was an "amicable split", that's not remotely the tenor I get from that newsletter, but Charlie likes ATI, and Raja is an ATI guy. I think it's pretty telling that this dropped exactly 3 months to the day since AXG was broken apart. Raja's most likely been on garden leave for a contractually-mandated 3 months while they try to clean up his mess. Again.
And their Linux drivers are pretty solid usually.
They need to do better to compete on the high-end, but I love them for my daily driver work laptop.
Any one remembers the flop that was Vega?
It was so hyped, and then it floped, let's hope Intel entire GPU division doesn't flop too
So he has had some successful launches, which probably is why he landed these gigs… however yes, Vega wasn’t much of a hit for gaming. It mainly excelled at compute.
The next step should be to scale down GPU design, and attract Nvidia and AMD to Fab with Intel.
There are at least a few of us on HN who have been very critical of Raja since the beginning.
I think what Intel needs is a culture of innovation. Where things can be experimented with, failed, evaluated with data-driven insights.
I actually think somebody who is creative, can articulate vision, and act effectively on criticism (eg change direction), be just a little less -inclusivity-building and more meritocracy-building -- is all they need.
Somebody like Elon Mask.
I would be more concerned by the opposite - presuming to fix the company using the same people who were responsible for the decline
in this case, Intel's situation on GPUs is so dire that it makes total sense to clear the bench...the status quo was bleak
From the outside this looks like a classic case of giving someone a window seat and sending the message, if not outright telling them: 'figure out your next career move'. He botched Arc badly (both in execution and messaging) and was briefly promoted then demoted. Had he tried to stick around, he most likely would have been let go and soon.
(Jensen is the CEO and founder of Nvidia and the uncle of the CEO of AMD, both are from Taiwan.)
IIRC this myth has been debunked. Jensen and Lisa are not related.
However, it is really expensive. Even worse, from Intel's point of view, that enormous expense is almost all in software--which must be maintained for an extended amount of time and looks like a pure expense that will never be recouped.
Even AMD is struggling with this.
If Intel wanted to win this space, they needed to embed a bunch of staff in every major gaming company to make sure their engine runs well on the card.
If Intel really wanted to displace Nvidia, they needed to completely open the specs and fund every single academic ML/AI/Graphic research team for the next 10 years if they used Intel cards.
The cynic in me feel that Intel is targeting the gaming market now because they have no shot in the enterprise world and they need _someone_ to fund their GPU development. Still it’s welcomed competition. Enjoy it while it last I guess.
Not even asking for a A100/H100 level thing now, but please break the A40 30-TFLOPS-and-lower-market (I even don't mind putting two 'max' 1100 for one A40...).
Just start selling some gear to benchmark and port stuff to sycl dammit. No big OEM (HPE, Dell, Lenovo) has any to put in their servers (or at least they're not selling them to me) and why make it so hard.
Either Intel doesn't remember how to sell server gear or they can't deliver anything but supercomputer stuff and EVEN THERE it's still spotty it seems.
You know it's buggy when the Ubuntu installer gets on the network just fine, but it misnames the Ethernet interface and chokes on the WiFi drivers firmware. Meanwhile Debian 10 and 11 just work on the same hardware with zero futzing or debugging m
(Checks watch) Uh... Intel has been working on graphics for over twenty-five years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_graphics_process...
It seems like every 5 years, they say, "This is it, we're gonna be competitive this time," and ... they never are. Not even close.
Yeah but integrated graphics and dedicated desktop/server class GPUs for graphics, multimedia and general compute are two completely different beasts in terms of HW and SW.
Qualcomm, ARM, Imagination also have been making GPU IPs since forever, but I doubt any of them can jump in the ring with Nvidia and AMD. Do you think they wouldn't like a piece of that lucrative market share? But they know that dislodging the Nvidia-AMD duopoly so late in the game is an exercise in futility.
A company that has been making GPU drivers for so long shouldn't be releasing the utter dumpster fire that was their discreet GPU drivers. Reviewers found features were missing, didn't work, or were horribly unreliable.
Xeon Phi is also not a GPU product, surely
GamersNexus laughed them out of the room and said the drivers were unreliable, the software featureless, and performance was beyond underwhelming.
As someone else pointed out: Intel has been in the GPU market for nearly three decades. They have a massive amount of in-house talent and fab ability.
They're also arriving right as the market has collapsed - it's completely saturated and a huge amount of demand evaporated overnight. There's little to no market for current consumer or even workstation class GPUs in terms of "AI" - growth in that sector is almost entirely in datacenter-tier products, which Intel offers nothing for.