Reconnect Intel with enthusiasts The industry has certainly changed over the last 20 years. Kyle Bennett, the founder and a fearless leader of HardOCP has decided to join Intel as a Director of Enthusiast Engagement for Intel’s Technology Leadership Marketing group.

Kyle is one of the first guys to do IT hardware news and reviews. His website launched some 20 years ago and has had a great run for quite a long time. A few months ago, in October 2018, Ryan Shrout of PCPerspective joined Intel as a chief performance strategist.

Many years ago, in 2014 Anand Shimpi a founder of the now several times sold AnandTech went to work for Apple and kind of started the whole thing. In the meantime, in late 2015 Scott Wasson, an editor in chief of TechReport joined AMD.

Damien Triolet, ex. senior editor of Hardware.fr joined AMD first in June 2017, to leave and work for Intel from November 2018 as Director of Technical Marketing, Discrete Graphics and Visual Technologies at Intel.

What most of these people have in common is that Raja Koduri and Chris Hook played an important role in hiring senior editors and editors in chief to work in the industry. Jon Carvill was also close to many of these people and understands the power of PR and what these chaps are capable of.

One huge advantage that the people mentioned above have against people who made a career in the IT industry is that they are very much in touch with the community as this was a big part of their success. This is what most IT companies are lacking as they blindly believe in the big analytic reports what the world will be like in a few years from now.

Kyle is now going to wear a corporate hat and will help Intel reconnect with the top of the high-performance consumer pyramid which contains hardware enthusiasts, overclockers, gamers, and content creators. He seems to be a great chap for the job. A person who understand the technology and what these one percent of the market wants is definitely able to help.

Unfortunately, it also means that we won't see any new content on HardOCP. According to Kyle, the site will be "mothballed", rather than sold, and will no longer publish news, editorial, or hardware review content, while HardForum will be sold to another company. It will be demonitised and all advertising and commission links removed and will receive funding via Patreon.

Kyle promises that prominent leaders at Intel including Raja Koduri, Jim Keller and Murthy Renduchintala plans to open up more to the community, and this is what people need. To be fair, AMD did a good job promoting Lisa Su as a leader that cares and it is clear that Intel is making a killer task force to challenge its competitors. This is not the place to go deeper and mention that under the same management, AMD lost its key GPU and CPU leaders but this has happened.

AMD might be the first on Intel’s list and with the launch of discrete graphics, Nvidia is next in line. This will rekindle the fun time in the GPU world - that's guaranteed.

Kyle will have a great job as Nvidia is a perfect example of how the leading company managed to care much more about new growing areas and gaming GPU its key bread and butter and a money maker. Talking about GPUs is not as sexy as talking about AI and data centers that make far better margins and makes stock prices rise.

Kyle and as a matter a fact all the people mentioned above are people that we worked with and I had some of the best technology conversations with them in my life. They are all great assets and Kyle is a "get things done" person who can help Intel in this new job.

Intel, as I mentioned in late 2018, is heavily regrouping and history has taught us that after Intel’s major troubles, they become stronger than ever. Kyle, Ryan Shrout, and Damien are now part of that team and Raja, Hook, Murthy, Keller and Carvill are all proven industry leaders and will help many great people at Intel to tune up.