Five years after taking over as head of Intel’s graphics division, Raja Koduri is leaving the company to create his own start-up following a restructuring.
Raja Koduri is leaving Intel to create his own start-up
Raja Koduri, head of Intel’s graphics division, announced his departure from the company in November 2017 after a new restructuring, following the AGX restructuring last December.
His arrival in the company was marked by the desire to renew the graphics chips and to be able to offer something other than iGPUs, since the i740 of 1998 and the abandonment of Larrabee in 2010.
Unfortunately, not everything went well:
- On the consumer side, a DGPU promised for late 2020 that was only an iGPU turned into a PCIe version named DG1 and the Arc Alchemist cards released in late 2022, but pushed back more than a year on the original schedule.
- On the professional/server side, Arctic Sound M is the only “available” GPU, but that has seen its P (premium) version and its successor Lancaster Sound cancelled. Ponte Vecchio is still not available except on the Aurora supercomputer, which is also not yet completed. On the other hand, its replacement, Rialto Bridge, has also been cancelled to make way for the Falcon Shore XPU which will arrive in 2025.
Despite this, when you see the follow-up to ARC GPUs, Intel continues to invest in this area, but has not yet announced a replacement for the head of the graphics division. Raja Koduri will not be retiring just yet as he has announced that he wants to create a start-up dedicated to improving AI without the use of CUDA.
