Raja Koduri, who was a central figure in Intel’s efforts to enter the video card market, is leaving the company after five years of work and is turning to a start-up in the field of generative artificial intelligence
Raja Koduri, one of the most colorful and well-known executives at Intel in recent years, announces his departure – a little more than five years after he unexpectedly “defected” from the AMD camp to become responsible for the new graphics processing division of the major chip manufacturer.
Kodori’s history in the world of graphics processing begins with the late S3 Graphics (manufacturer of ViRGE cards) in the mid-nineties, from where he moved to become a central figure at ATI and integrated into AMD after that famous acquisition deal, serving as the CTO of The company’s graphics processing. In 2009, he made his first high-profile move when he landed at Apple, and in 2013 he returned to AMD as vice president of the company’s visual processing division – while accepting responsibility for leading the development of the Polaris, Vega and Navi architectures, some of which are still in use today and have helped make the chip developer Microsoft’s and Sony’s best friend in the console market.
At the end of 2017 came the announcement of Raja’s big move from AMD to Intel – as the chief architect in the newly created graphics processing division of the company. Since then, Kodori has become the face of the company’s fresh Arc brand designed to fight NVIDIA’s hegemony over AMD, and although the road has not been easy at all, he can certainly credit the fact that today consumers can walk into computer stores and decide between three manufacturers of processing cores For graphics cards, for the first time after two decades of a formidable duopoly. This is in addition to the fact that the Aurora supercomputer will soon start operating in the US, with a record-breaking maximum theoretical performance of 2ExaFLOPS based entirely on Intel’s main processors and accelerators (graphics).
Raja Kodori’s next stop looks like a significant change of direction, when it comes to the startup’s development of Generative AI software for the gaming and media worlds. It sounds intriguing, but the challenge may be especially great given that artificial intelligence is the hottest trend in the entire tech world with countless talented people planning to try their hand at the field, or already doing so.
The one who announced this departure is Intel’s own CEO, Pat Gelsinger, while Kodori addressed this announcement in his own tweet and confirmed it. The two made sure to keep it low-key and thanked each other for a great time together, but in practice it’s pretty hard not to feel some kind of miss during it – Given Intel’s generally challenging state of the market and the launch of Arc Alchemist models that it’s doubtful anyone outside the manufacturer’s walls could call successful. Will Raja’s next mysterious project bring him back into the headlines or will it be the end of the road for him as a ‘rockstar’ of the tech world? time will tell.
