Raja Koduri, Intel's chief architect and the man responsible for bolstering Intel's discrete graphics efforts at Xe, received an AMD RX 6800 graphics card in the mail as a "surprise" from his former employer.

Koduri left his top position at Radeon Technology Group in 2017 and briefly stepped away from his duties in the days following Vega's launch; it was always said that the Navi architecture (before it was called RDNA) was Koduri's pet project so it is perhaps fitting that he, now a GPU engineer at Intel, should receive an RDNA 2 card. [The RX 6800 is a pretty amazing example of what the second generation Navi can do, but it is a huge leap forward from the first generation and the RX 5000 series.

GPU architectures take years to develop, and engineers are often working on projects far beyond what the public is running or has knowledge of. An example is the Infinity cache on the latest RDNA 2 graphics cards. At last year's pre-launch AMD Engineering Roundtable, Product Technology Architect Sam Naffziger explained that this "new" innovation had been studied at RTG for at least three years

before we even got a whiff of it.

To understand this process to some extent, one need only look at the huge list of published patents that any of these GPU companies submit week after week. Many of them will not see the light of day for years.

As for Koduri, he is working on something that will directly compete with AMD's graphics cards in DG2. It is a gaming graphics card built on the Intel Xe architecture, which is said to encompass 512 EU GPUs. iGPUs in Tiger Lake max out at 96 EU, which is pretty huge by current Xe standards.

In other news, the RX 6800 samples were sent back to AMD and apparently "got lost in the post" for a moment. Coincidence? I don't think so. .......