Intel, the return to dedicated GPUs passes through an AMD veteran

Intel hired Masooma Bhaiwala, snatching it from AMD, to guide his return to the world of Dedicated GPUs scheduled for next year. The woman, in a statement on the CRN website, said that her title in Intel is that of “vice president for discrete GPUs”, a role that will therefore see her driving dedicated GPUs for the client, datacenter and HPC sectors.

Bhaiwala started working for the microchip giant this month, based on her LinkedIn profile, more precisely in the “Graphics and Throughput Computing Hardware Engineering” team that falls within the division Architecture, Graphics and Software managed by Raja Koduri, also ex of AMD, in Intel since late 2017.

Masooma Bhaiwala leaves AMD after 15 years and 6 months, but on his profile he writes that he has more than 27 years of experience in “building teams that design chips and create high quality solutions respecting the deadlines”.

“After over 15 incredible years in AMD I decided to take a different opportunity… it was a really fun race, with an incredible team, during which we made some really cool chips, “reads a post on LinkedIn.

Bhaiwala is only the latest in a long line of former executives and engineers that Intel stole from AMD to set up its return in dedicated GPUs, but also to improve the know-how in the CPU field. In addition to Koduri in recent years we have seen names of the caliber of Mark Hirsch, Jim Keller, Balaji Kanigicherla, Kalyan Thumaty and Joseph Facca change his jacket. And they are only a few, the list is very long.

Despite the latest rumors of these weeks that are not exactly reassuring as far as GPUs are concerned, Intel intends to create a series of products that range from the renewal of the graphics integrated in its CPUs to covering the gaming market and that of artificial intelligence and supercomputers . Intel recently announced Ponte Vecchio, its first 7-nanometer chip accelerator that we will see in the Aurora supercomputer in 2021.

The US company is working on an architecture called Xe, from which there will be branches to cover every single market, and on a bookshop OneAPI which wants to allow developers to create code that can run and scale on different products, not only GPUs but also GPUs, FPGAs and specialized AI accelerators.

While on AMD, Masooma Bhaiwala oversaw the creation of three semi-custom chips for game consoles, but also similar projects for other customers, she was in charge of the Trinity APU (2012) and AMD K8 Rev G. Before joining AMD in 2004 she was senior RTL manager in Sun Microsystems and senior verification engineer at Digital Equipment Corp.