Raja Koduri explains the reasons that led him to leave AMD and join Intel

After more than a year and a half of silence, Raja Koduri finally explains the reasons why he left AMD and ended up signing for Intel.

One of the most notable news of 2017 was the departure of Raja Koduri from AMD to end up landing at Intel. He currently holds the positions of Intel Chief Architect, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cores & Visual Computing & Edge Computing Solutions. Its main mission is to develop a graphics card that has the ability to compete with NVIDIA's high-end. During an interview, he explained the reasons why he left AMD. Also about the signing of Jim Keller, who was an architect of the AMD Ryzen and more than 4.500 people.

Raja Koduri talks about his departure from AMD

It is not unknown that the cut of 60% of the budget of the Radeon division to give it to the processor division was one of the triggers. The other was the insistence on launching Vega, an architecture in development and that was not finished (and the Radeon VII still has not been seen). All this led to certain tensions with Lisa Su and in the end he ended up leaving.

Choosing Intel for Koduri was pretty straightforward, as he liked the company vision, staff, assets, and resources to create a competitive chart:

“We also have a very rich AI acceleration roadmap. So when AI really hits the [growth] curve, I think we'll be the only company that will have a complete roadmap of products that cover all needs, from low-power use cases to mega-hub use cases. of data. We have a very good portfolio of assets. We have also doubled investments in software… So we have a comprehensive Artificial Intelligence strategy and we are excited about the direction we are going to take. ”

Source: barron's