Eric Demers, who recently led Qualcomm’s GPU efforts as senior vice president of engineering, tells CRN he will lead GPU engineering with a focus on AI at Intel.
Intel has hired an executive who led Qualcomm’s GPU engineering efforts to aid with the semiconductor giant’s latest attempt at building AI chips for data centers.
Eric Demers, who recently led Qualcomm’s GPU efforts as senior vice president of engineering, told CRN in a LinkedIn private message that he is starting next week at Intel to lead GPU engineering with a focus on AI as a senior vice president.
[Related: Qualcomm Loses Second Channel Leader Amid Snapdragon X2 PC Chip Push]
Demers announced his plan to join Intel on LinkedIn earlier in the day.
An Intel spokesperson declined to comment.
Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy, told CRN Friday that he was surprised by Demers leaving Qualcomm for Intel, mainly because the executive had been at the former company for nearly 14 years.
The analyst said the personnel move is “bigger than people realize.”
“I think people a lot of times focus on executives. And he is an executive, but also he is a GPU architect, of which there are not that many that are at the level that he is at because he can basically build a GPU architecture from the ground up,” he said.
Qualcomm did not respond to a request for comment.
As the leader of Qualcomm’s GPU efforts, Demers was responsible for the company’s Adreno GPU hardware and architecture, which spanned mobile devices, PCs, IoT devices, automotive systems as well as augmented reality and virtual reality devices.
Before Demers left Qualcomm, he had spent time in the previous months promoting his team’s work on the latest Adreno GPU implementation for the company’s upcoming Snapdragon X2 Series chips for Windows PCs.
Sag said it made sense that Demers would take on a GPU engineering leadership role for the data center segment because the executive’s team had been focused on AI in recent years.
“If you look at Qualcomm’s GPU architecture today, a lot of that is also focused on AI, and there’s already things that they’re doing to make AI more efficient and more performant on the architecture,” the analyst said.
Prior to joining Qualcomm in 2012, Demers was CTO for AMD’s graphics division. He joined AMD through its 2006 acquisition of graphics chip designer ATI, where he started in 2000 after a slew of jobs at smaller chip firms, including Silicon Graphics.
