Former AMD CEO joins Intel GPU division

Intel has hired a former AMD CEO for its GPU division. Masooma Bhaiwala will start at the chip manufacturer as ‘vice president discrete GPU SOCs’. With this, she will get to work with Intel’s upcoming Xe GPUs for data centers and high-performance computing.

Bhaiwala has been employed by Intel since December, CRN discovered. She worked at AMD as corporate vice president and was involved in the development of semi-custom GPUs for consoles, as well as semi-custom APUs and asic designs. Before joining AMD in 2004, she worked at Sun Microsystems and Digital Equipment Corp., among others.

Bhaiwala informs CRN that she will be joining Intel as vice president of discrete GPU SOCs. To this end, it is part of Intel’s Graphics and Throughput Computer Hardware Engineering division, which in turn is part of the Intel Architecture, Graphics and Software group. At the helm of this industry is Raja Koduri, who previously also worked at AMD as the chief executive of the Radeon business unit.

Intel has already hired several former AMD employees, including Mark Hirsch, Joseph Facca, Balaji Kanigicherla and Jim Keller. The latter has worked on AMD’s Zen architecture, among other things. Intel also hired Gary Patton of GlobalFoundries earlier this month. He worked on 7nm processes and smaller, among other things. However, GlobalFoundries stopped developing these processes in 2018.

Intel has been working on its own GPUs for several years now. In 2020, for example, Intel wants to release a Xe video card for gamers, but it is also working on GPUs for other user scenarios. Earlier this year, Intel unveiled its Ponte Vecchio GPU for data centers and supercomputers, which is based on 7nm chiplets. It has not yet been officially announced when these specific GPUs should be released, but this is expected to happen in 2021. The GPU should in any case be used in the Aurora supercomputer, which will be released in 2021.