



Back in September, AMD Radeon Technologies Group (RTG) chief Raja Koduri took a sabbatical following the launch of the Radeon RX Vega series of graphics cards . At the time, Koduri explained, "Vega was personally hard on me as well and I used up a lot of family credits during this journey. I have decided to take a time-off in Q4 to spend time with my family."

Today, we received word that Koduri has left AMD, and the company was adamant to let everyone know that its roadmap will stay intact despite the departure. AMD’s statement was clearly crafted to let customers and investors know that there is no reason for panic now that Koduri is gone and that the company will begin the search for a new leader (AMD CEO Lisa Su is serving as the interim RTG head in the meantime).

Now we're going to take this latest bit of news with a grain of salt at the moment, but the word on the street is that Koduri left AMD to take his talents to Intel. WCCFTech claims that "sources close to the related companies" have confirmed that Koduri will be joining Intel in a yet-to-be-named capacity. The announcement will reportedly come “soon” from Intel.



Intel's Kaby Lake-G series processors with on-chip AMD Radeon graphics

If this rumor turns out to be true, it would be the second blow for NVIDIA this week. Earlier this week, Intel made the jaw-dropping announcement that AMD Radeon GPUs would be integrated on-chip with Intel Kaby Lake-G series processors, enabling a new class of ultra-thin, high-performance notebooks.

With Koduri onboard, Intel would have yet another sharp tool at its disposal, given his heavy involvement with the Vega graphics architecture. That expertise will not only be beneficial to Intel's current efforts with Kaby Lake-G, but also future iterations of the processor family.





WCCFTech adds that Koduri's many talents would also be beneficial to Intel's efforts in advancing its Nervana platform, which is tasked with tackling deep learning workloads. This is yet another area where Intel has been trying to encroach on NVIDIA dominance.

For now, we'll just have to wait until Intel makes the official announcement of the newest member to its team to learn more details on what Koduri will be working on in the future.