To me, it's a lot like trying to judge a president during or immediately after their term, especially on things like economics. Yes, he who sat in the chair owns the results, but the effects of policies usually take a decade or more to sort out - less so for consumer electronics, yet still more than most prefer to consider.
Hmm, I don't know.
I mean... AMD has it's issues, that's for sure. But Raja overhyped and mis-sold the product to the point that it was almost impossible for the Vega releases to be anything but a colossal let-down.
Now, Vega has had a very, very long life. It's still used in some of the APUs today. It is by no means a failed technology. It just wasn't what Raja was selling to the public when it first released.
Now, here we are with Intel. A lot of hype events. A lot of random benchmarks with no context. No review samples. A lot of missed dates.
I don't think it has anything to do with resources. I think we have to clear-cut cases of just plain bad management. Raja is great at Hype. What he isn't good at is shaping and tempering expectations. And when products can't live up to the hype he's selling, it's a horrible, horrible look for the company who's hat he happens to be wearing at the time.
Before Raja got on board, I thought Intel had a dGPU plan. Back when Kyle was hired for a bit -- they were pushing enthusiast-oriented driver packages, pledging a more aggressive driver update schedule, and the hardware would be ok, and follow at some point. As soon as Raja got in there - all that focus shifted 180 degrees.
It's clear to me, at least, where the issue lay.
Now.... I can put on my tin foil hat ... my opinion is that, in the Board Room -- nothing to do with Raja really -- is that Intel is just chasing this dGPU business because they want a piece of the mining action. I can provide circumstantial evidence - in this latest earnings call, they emphasize how they had shipped a lot of units to crypto, compute and other customers (just not dGPUs). Now, sure, that ~could~ be data centers... but how many data centers are jumping on a Gen 1 product from a company with no track record... even one with an Intel sticker on it? So I think those were all miners - not really anything else. And I think the dGPU business is more of that -- they really want a piece of that insatiable mining market. They have their FPGA division working on dedicated ASICS, they have the "compute" side for not-quite-industrial-scale, but still large scale with deep pockets, and then their dGPU division is marketed as gamer, but in reality, it's aimed at all those home-miners who just have a handful of rigs in their basement or garage.
So the Board, in my opinion, I don't think cares too much about if their dGPU can play games or not, so long as it does well on hash/W, and they can produce it for a competitive price in that context. Raja is Intel's version of Ronald McDonald -- the clown out there to help sell the cheeseburgers to the kids, while the real business is aimed at the miners.
