Intel Re-Orgs AXG Graphics Group, Raja Koduri Moves Back To Chief Architect Role

Intel announced today that it would split its AXG graphics group to separately address the gaming and data center markets by placing it under two other business units. Raja Koduri, currently the Executive Vice President of the AXG business unit, will return to his previous role as an Intel Chief Architect. From a report: "Discrete graphics and accelerated computing are critical growth engines for Intel. With our flagship products now in production, we are evolving our structure to accelerate and scale their impact and drive go-to-market strategies with a unified voice to customers. This includes our consumer graphics teams joining our client computing group, and our accelerated computing teams joining our datacenter and AI group. In addition, Raja Koduri will return to the Intel Chief Architect role to focus on our growing efforts across CPU, GPU and AI, and accelerating high priority technical programs," Intel said.

We spoke with Intel, and the company assures us that it remains fully committed to its existing roadmap of Arc consumer discrete GPUs, meaning it intends to launch the second-gen Battlemage and third-gen Celestial gaming GPUs as planned. Those GPUs will join the recently launched Alchemist series, which will also continue to be supported.

The next phase in the Larrabee 2 project has begun

[ffkom]

According to the playbook they followed for Larrabee 1, the next phase is to shut down the now "gaming only" discrete graphics department, and claim that "Xe" will somehow survive as a thing for-data-centers-only: https://www.computerworld.com/... [computerworld.com]

When Intel released their first Arc GPUs "only for the Chinese market", we knew this was doomed.
And given that they never attempted to undercut the price-per-performance ratio of their well-established competitors, it did not really seem like an honest attempt to penetrate the market for discrete GPUs, anyway.

Re: The next phase in the Larrabee 2 project has b

[SuperDre]

Huh? They aren't sopping the ARC discrete GPU's, they just split it up as datacenters and consumers are completely different targets and require different groups to accommodate better.

I wish them well

[timeOday]

It's all too easy to be cynical about Intel's chances, since they had such a big lead in both design and fabrication and lost it. But the fact is we need another strong producer of GPUs. Between gaming and AI it seems that the majority of all transistors fabbed in the foreseeable future will be for GPUs, not CPUs. All the real opportunities for advancement are in tensor processing.

Re:

[jacks smirking reven]

Agreed and from all the reports it seems like Intel had a pretty OK offering for a first gen entry into the GPU market which has been two primary vendors for something like that past 20 years. The hardware is decent but they need more time to cook drivers which is understandably a difficult task for even Intel.

If Intel was smart (jury is always out) they should have expected the first gen cards would not be a instant success but this is a long term project. If their second gen hardware and continued drive

Re:

[ffkom]

As much as I would appreciate a third vendor for discrete GPUs: Even if you give them that "competitive GPUs are hard to make", so it may be excused that the first one you bring to the market is not the fastest or most reliable, there is one parameter where they were pretty much free to choose: The price. If you are earnest in an effort to enter a market as a runner-up, and cannot offer a better product, you need to provide an incentive for potential buyers to take the risk of buying "that exotic new thing"

Re:

[Z80a]

To be fair, they don't even need a much better hardware.
Just make good drivers for ARC and bob's your uncle, it can very well fight nvidia.

Re:

[mobby_6kl]

For all we know, the drivers are fixed now.

It seems that everyone did the benchmarks on day 1, declared half of the games unplayable, and promptly forgot about the Arc and went back to jerking it to $2000 4090s and yet another generation of AMD cards that doesn't idle properly.

And it definitely should've been tested the way it was released, but you'd think someone would take a few hours to go back and test the games that had issues to see if they're better now.

Re:

[Z80a]

They fixed the DX9/10/11 issues, but i think there's still usability issues etc..
But given time, it will be fixed, probably in time for battlemage to hailed as the videocard that fixed everything, while ARC was already working fine.

Hope..

[SuperDre]

I just hope they ramp up their ARC A770/16GB production as they haven't been available after the first week.