For over a decade Intel was nowhere to be seen in the GPU market, but the company soon understood its shortcomings, and in a radical approach towards GPUs Intel hired Raja Koduri in 2017, and it marked Intel’s rather aggressive journey of hiring GPU engineers from various companies.
Though intel has been roping in engineers from many big names, one particular company seems to be on Intel’s most preferred list and that’s Raja Koduri’s former company, AMD. Last month intel 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 and he will be responsible for the development of the company’s Xe architectures.
According to sources, Mr. Vineet Goel will be heading a group of architects and engineers at Intel who 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, it seems that Goel will be working on Intel’s Xe GPUs that will come after them.
Goel 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 AMD till 2011, when he joined his former colleague Eric Demers at Qualcomm and has since then worked on ultra-low-power Adreno GPUs for Snapdragon system-on-chips. He then rejoined AMD in mid-2016.
Goel adds to the growing list of ex-AMD graphics engineers or executives that Intel has dropped-in in the recent years. Team blue has also hired multiple people from Nvidia and the company’s other noteworthy engineers which it has recently dropped in include Masooma Bhaiwala, Tom Petersen, Jon Carvill, Antal Tungler, Darren McPhee, Devon Nekechuk, Damien Triolet, and others.