An AMD veteran moves on to Intel GPU development

After radically changing its approach to GPUs and hiring Raja Koduri in 2017, Intel has begun aggressively hiring GPU engineers from various companies, most notably Raja Koduri's former company, AMD. Last month Intel enlisted the help of Vineet Goel, an AMD graphics technology veteran.

At Intel, Vineet Goel will serve as Vice President and General Manager of Xe GPU Architecture and IP Engineering and will be responsible for the development of the Xe architectures. An Intel spokesperson confirmed to CRN that Goel will lead a group of engineers who "will design and verify Intel's IP Xe road map". Since the first two or three generations of Xe architectures have already been defined (or at least named), Goel will have an impact on GPUs that will only be launched in several years.

Photo credit: Intel Vineet Goel had a brilliant career in the graphics industry. Most recently he was Corporate Vice President of GPU Architecture at AMD and before that (August 2016 to June 2019) he was responsible for the development of the company's GPU architecture. Given the timing, Vineet Goel played a key role in the development of AMD's latest RDNA and RDNA 2 architectures, as well as CDNA and CDNA 2. In addition, it also contributed heavily to the future RDNA 3 and CDNA 3 architectures.

Goel began his career in Real3D in the late 1990s, continuing in the ATI Technologies division in Orlando after Real3D was sold to Intel in 1999. He worked at ATI and then at AMD until 2011, when he was joined his former colleague Eric Demers at Qualcomm and worked on the ultra-low-power Adreno GPU for System-On-Chip Snapdragon. He spent about five years at Qualcomm and then returned to AMD in mid-2016.

Credit: Intel Over the course of his career, Goel has obtained dozens of patents related to graphics and worked on ATI's TruForm and other tessellation technologies (for Microsoft's Xbox 360, ATI's Terascale / Terascale 2 architectures ) supported by the company's GPUs over the years. His most recent inventions include FidelityFX Super Resolution, multi-instance GPUs, and chiplet-based machine learning accelerators.

Vineet Goel is another former graphics engineer or AMD executive that Intel has hired in recent years. The company also attracted some people from NVIDIA to it. Among Intel's notable hires in recent years are Masooma Bhaiwala, Tom Petersen, Jon Carvill, Antal Tungler, Darren McPhee, Devon Nekechuk, Damien Triolet, and many more. Intel also recently augmented its game developer relations team with four highly experienced executives.