Intel Reportedly Fired Raja Koduri

Raja M. Koduri is an Indian-American computer engineer and executive for computer graphics hardware. Intel hired him from AMD in 2017, and he worked for Intel for 5 years, attempting to compete with Nvidia and AMD in the discrete graphics cards market for gamers.

Raja Koduri previously announced that he resigned from Intel to work on his startup, but now according to revealed that Raja Koduri was first demoted from the AXG group’s leadership, and then he was fired. Due to this, numerous chips and projects were also canceled.

MLID’s statements, through reliable sources, confirm that the AXG group is dead and that only a few SKUs will survive, but the first step was to remove Koduri from command.

Now mid-range or low-mid-range graphics cards will be delayed significantly and will not compete until 2026 or 2027 with competition from AMD and NVIDIA. 

Pat Gelsinger (CEO of Intel), who replaced Bob Swan, brought fresh air to the organization while leaving traces of the past. The company is at a highly complex point due to challenging and extreme actions like opening IFS to other businesses, entering the market for graphics cards and AI/HPC and investing in more FABs.

In this 2023, a series of updates to the current Alchemist will arrive, in principle, with a higher final frequency, which will boost performance and perhaps with more incredible speed in VRAM.

Next year, we will have Battlemage, specifically in the second quarter. This architecture will arrive with a 250 mm2 die that could compete with the current GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, but no more. It will include 12GB of VRAM and a 192-bit bus. Intel is also moving to the larger L2 cache or has managed to push it out of the die by introducing a new high-performance interconnect bus.

At this time, the biggest problem is that the architecture is not paying off as the Alchemist is not selling at the anticipated rate, and there are constant delays; the drivers now, after months of problems, are starting to stand out.

And the worst thing is that Intel is going through a difficult time economically. Everything discussed is focused on the next ten years, where Druid (2027) now seems to be the hope after the crisis that Intel is experiencing.