More fallout from Intel's latest earning report.
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Dr. Randhir Thakur is being replaced by Stuart Pann as head of Intel Foundry Services. This was a previously announced departure, so it's not a surprise. What is interesting is that Pann is a businessman, not someone with an engineering background. That hasn't historically worked out well for Intel.
More notable is that Raja Koduri is out as GPU chief. After getting fired for the failures of Vega over at AMD, Intel is now showing him the door for the failures of the Arc devision. Currently, Intel's graphics card efforts are on life support, with major price cuts on the A750 model. (Recently down to $225 at Newegg.)
Tom at Moore's Law is Dead has been covering this for some time, saying that "Arc is effectively dead". He got the leaked internal memo that Pat Gelsinger sent out to employees, stating that he had "mixed feelings" about Raja leaving. Typically, these things are announced in advance, but this was barely a footnote. Most likely, this was not an amicable departure.
Concerning the future of Intel's Arc plans, Tom says there have been revisions to the current gen Alchemist GPUs, but Intel may not put those into production, since current Arc products are sitting on store shelves. Next gen Battlemage won't be out until late 2024, and after that, Celestial in 2026, both with a single die planned. The one bright spot for Arc is that Gelsinger hasn't canceled the final product in the series, Druid, with a full line planned for 2027. It may be that Intel is planning to reboot their GPU products in four years, and just keeping it on life support until then.
It is possible that Gelsinger is refusing to completely give up on Arc, for personal reasons, because he was in charge of the failed i740 GPU project from 25 years ago, and doesn't want a repeat.
If you want the full skinny, Tom details what his sources said in the latest video.