Intel poaches another lead GPU designer from AMD

In a nutshell: Rohit Verma, an AMD veteran SoC architect, has jumped ship back to Intel. In his new role, he’ll be doing the same thing he did at AMD — leading the design process of discrete GPUs. Before his 8-year stint at AMD, Verma spent 15 years with Intel. His LinkedIn page says he was a lead SoC architect during that time. Before that, he worked at National Semiconductor, which no longer exists.

Verma was AMD’s Lead SoC Architect for discrete GPU SoCs for the past three years, during which he worked on projects for the gaming, cloud gaming, consumer, and workstation market segments. For five years before that, he worked in AMD’s Semi-Custom business unit as a lead architect.

At Intel, he has joined the AXG group, a segment of Intel’s graphics division created by Raja Koduri last year, as the Lead Product Architect of discrete GPU SoCs. “It’s great to be back at Intel and I’m looking forward to working with the team to define and build innovative next generation GPU products!” he wrote on LinkedIn.

Verma will probably have a hand in the development of Intel’s Battlemage and Celestial GPUs.

Intel has a record of poaching senior AMD engineers. In 2017, they recruited former head of Radeon Technologies Group Raja Koduri and appointed him Senior Vice President of the Core and Visual Computing Group. He has since led Intel’s development of discrete GPUs and enterprise accelerators.

A year later, Intel recruited the designer of the Zen architecture, Jim Keller, though he left in 2020 after a dispute. From AMD’s marketing team, Intel has hired Chris Hook, Darren McPhee, Damien Triolet, and Heather Lennon.

It’s the nature of competition to try and take each other’s talent, but it’s nonetheless sad for AMD. It might have recently reached the same market cap as Intel, but the latter still has significantly more capital with which to invest in employees.