To support its efforts to build a competitive consumer GPU lineup under the Xe brand, which Intel likes to call its "Odyssey," the company scored another higher-up from AMD, this time Ali Ibrahim. He joined Intel this month as a vice-president within the Architecture, Graphics and Software group, although the company didn't specify his responsibilities. "We are thrilled that Ali has joined Intel as Vice President, Platform Architecture and Engineering - dGPUs to be part of the exciting Intel Xe graphics journey," said an Intel spokesperson in a comment to CRN.

During his 13-year tenure at AMD, Ali Ibrahim was the chief-architect of the company's cloud gaming and console SoC businesses, which provides valuable insight into Intel's breakneck efforts to build high-end discrete GPUs (something it lacked for the past two decades). Intel is the only other company that is capable of building semi-custom chips for someone like Microsoft or Sony as the inventor of x86, provided it has a GPU that can match AMD's in the console space. Likewise, with gaming taking baby steps to the cloud as big players such as Google betting on it, Intel sees an opportunity for cloud gaming GPUs that aren't too different from its "Ponte Vecchio" scalar processors. The transfer of talent isn't one-way, as AMD recently bagged Intel's server processor lead Dan McNamara to head the EPYC brand.