Intel recruited Ogi Brkic, a senior AMD data center GPU executive, to lead its HPC efforts.

Intel has hired Ogi Brkic, previously corporate vice president and general manager of the data center GPU business unit at AMD where he worked for 15 years, to serve as vice president and general manager of the Super Compute product line within the chipmaker's Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group. Brkic began at Intel in October and joins a growing roster of AMD executives brought in to build the company's discrete GPU business, including former chief GPU architect Raja Koduri in 2017, Masooma Bhaiwala in 2019, Ali Ibrahim in 2020, and Vineet Goel in October. The hire comes ahead of Intel's challenge to AMD and Nvidia with its Ponte Vecchio GPU, which will power the U.S. Department of Energy's Aurora exascale supercomputer scheduled to go online next year.

Within Intel, Brkic leads the Super Compute Group, formed in September within the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group that was established in June to accelerate the company's GPU and HPC efforts. His team holds responsibility for both CPU and GPU products and businesses for supercomputing and visual cloud applications, including "defining market needs, product positioning and ecosystem." This team will work closely with the Super Compute Platform Engineering team led by Brijesh Tripathi, which focuses on product design.

Brkic's departure from AMD preceded the company's October announcement of the Instinct MI200 series, a new line of GPU accelerators AMD said would provide "up to 4.9 times faster HPC performance and up to 20 percent faster AI performance compared with the 400-watt SXM version of Nvidia's flagship A100 GPU." According to Dominic Daninger, vice president of engineering at Nor-Tech, an HPC system integrator in Burnsville, Minnesota, Intel's latest hire demonstrates the company's renewed commitment to GPU competition after previous false starts with accelerators like Xeon Phi. "It's pretty clear that with Intel, somebody tickled the bear there and they're awake again," Daninger said, noting that unified memory shared between CPUs and GPUs represents a technological advantage that could distinguish Intel's approach.

Intel's entry into the GPU market as a third major player promises to benefit channel partners through increased supply and competition, Daninger explained. GPU shortages have emerged as a significant constraint; Daninger noted that his company has "had projects sitting for four or five months waiting for some GPUs, so it's extremely tight." AMD's price-performance advantages have already attracted customers previously defaulting to Nvidia, with Daninger observing that "we could just get a lot more compute power for X dollars then we could going with the default, which would have been Nvidia," demonstrating how intensifying competition in the HPC GPU space may reshape procurement decisions across the market.