Chris Hook to Lead Discrete GPU Marketing at Intel

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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Chris Hook, who recently left AMD as its Sr. Marketing Director, is now announcing that he is officially working for Intel. Interestingly, Hook's new position will be him "Leading Discrete GPU Marketing" at Intel. Hook has been responsible for marketing Radeon video cards for over a decade. Given that Intel does not currently sell any discrete video cards for gaming, this move looks to be that Intel is certainly telegraphing that it intends to get back into the gaming GPU space. Raja Koduri moving to Intel, certainly had people guessing whether or not he was there for compute, gaming, or both. Chris Hook's presence in marketing certainly tells us that Intel is mulling over a position in gaming GPUs once again. Chris Hook has just updated his LinkedIn page with his newly held position, "Discrete Graphics and Visual Technologies Marketing at Intel Corporation."
 
Will be interesting to see what Intel has planned. That said, I must have missed the good Radeon marketing the past decade or so. I recall it either being non-existent, or rather puzzling when they would take a shot at it before a new launch.
 
I'm interested to see what Intel can come up with. They have far more resources than AMD and I want to see an Nvidia competitor that can put them back in their place. I can always hope Navi will live up to the promises, but Vega was pretty disappointing.
 
IcePickFreak said:
Will be interesting to see what Intel has planned. That said, I must have missed the good Radeon marketing the past decade or so. I recall it either being non-existent, or rather puzzling when they would take a shot at it before a new launch.
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same here, it doesn't seem they are stealing the best talent out there.
But hey, anything is better than Intel's UHD stuff so..
and Intel's marketing is rather bad too so it's not like chris can make it worse too.

I think AMD is better off with those that left, and Intel is better off in gpu with anything they can get.
 
Well isn't Intel already the largest seller of graphics chips? I hope they can offer some competing options on the high end, but that is likely just a pipe dream.
 
Nothing against Chris but I gotta agree the last 10 years of AMD marketing seemed rather non-existent. I remember a lot of pre-2008 advertising but not so much before Vega/Ryzen. Could be they didn't give him a proper budget, I don't know. Could be he was making the best of a bad situation as AMD has had a rough patch much of the last 10 years. I would interested if he had anything to do with the XBOX/PS adoption of AMD. That would be impressive.

In either case I hope that Intel gives this team what they need to produce something useful.

edit: It also seems to me that much more of the good press for AMD has really come from the reviews I've seen here on [H] and a number of other sites. Honestly the reviews provided more coverage than any marketing I can think of.
 
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Intel has probably been jealously looking at AMD's control of the current console market (excluding nintendo). And I doubt the new GPU they're working on will be ready in time for the 2019/2020 refreshes so that will go to AMD as well.

Chris would be quiet handy in trying to talk Sony and MS over to the blue team if Raja manages to make a decent product for intel before the next console refresh cycle.
 
How do they go about making a discrete product without needing assistance of amd's and nvidia patents? Don't AMD and NVIDIA pretty much own most of them?
 
Does anyone else feel like Kaby Lake-G was Intel and AMD's agreement to let people be poached away from AMD? lol
"We'll pay you for some of your talent, just it'll come in the way of piggybacking off of one of our sales"
I wouldn't be surprised if we don't see Kaby-G in anything, as Intel's way of pulling the rug out from AMD -.-


Anyways, as far as marketing... There indeed wasn't too much, but I did find their "Rise Up" and "Radeon Rebellion" to be cool marketing campaigns:
AMD-Uprising-2.jpg
AMD-Polaris-Uprising.jpg
1a0c5b54491523.595d7aba5a5f7.jpg


Also while Googling images I came across a prior one that I had forgotten about, was YouTube based (don't believe I every watched the vids, limited bandwidth per month and all), but there was this, too:
TheFixer.jpg
 
Formula.350 said:
Anyways, as far as marketing... There indeed wasn't too much, but I did find their "Rise Up" and "Radeon Rebellion" to be cool marketing campaigns:
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Yeah, based off an old cold war slogan. What's up his sleeve next, Heil Intel?
 
Drep said:
How do they go about making a discrete product without needing assistance of amd's and nvidia patents? Don't AMD and NVIDIA pretty much own most of them?
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Not really, per se. Vulkan/OGL is open source and DX is licensed by Microsoft.

Many of AMDs technologies are free/open source, as well.
 
DejaWiz said:
Not really, per se. Vulkan/OGL is open source and DX is licensed by Microsoft.

Many of AMDs technologies are free/open source, as well.
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just because the API is open source or whatever does not mean the way a product is able to use it or does use it is not bound under IP laws/patents....if anyone has deep enough pockets to do as they please (has proven time and time again to do this) it would be Intel..even if they market something that is court actionable

the "feds" and courts would take a LONG time to force them not selling it, because they have more $$$$$$$$$$$$ than the defendant does, hell they barely paid pennies on the thousands when they were found at fault via AMD court cases, likely still have not paid anything towards it, longer they wait, longer they make investments that pay 10-100x the "loss" before they bother doing so , that is if the company they are supposed to pay does not fold first.

stupid corporate business ^.^
 
DejaWiz said:
Not really, per se. Vulkan/OGL is open source and DX is licensed by Microsoft.

Many of AMDs technologies are free/open source, as well.
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He's referring to the graphics extensions/feature sets, whatever you want to call them. It's what makes up the API are a core level.

For example, here are all the ones for OpenGL: https://www.khronos.org/registry/OpenGL/index_gl.php

Mind you, a card won't support all of them, even from their own vendor. Sometimes it's on a hardware level, sometimes at the driver level.

Just like Intel's x86 and AMD's x64 instruction sets, you need to license the necessary graphics extensions from someone in order to kick out a valid GPU..... Intel had previously done this and licensed from nVidia... That went south, and now they're licensing from AMD. OR you can develop your own, which is quite likely what all this hiring is about, so that they will be independent from AMD and nVidia.
 
GMcDougal said:
For everyone saying that Chris did a bad job at marketing for AMD, how do you suppose you market a GPU thats over priced and is under performing against the competition?
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I know i couldn't, but i am not the marketing expert.
 
I love the way some people think 'marketing' is simply about the explicit advertising. Given even the AMD fans here routinely expect so much from AMD, I'd say that demonstrates how well AMD have marketed their products. All their GPUs sold in the end.

They've certainly over-done the hype, but never actually misled.
 
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GMcDougal said:
For everyone saying that Chris did a bad job at marketing for AMD, how do you suppose you market a GPU thats over priced and is under performing against the competition?
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That's not even mentioning what kind of budget he was probably working with (i.e. not much)
 
zehoo said:
Intel has probably been jealously looking at AMD's control of the current console market (excluding nintendo). And I doubt the new GPU they're working on will be ready in time for the 2019/2020 refreshes so that will go to AMD as well.

Chris would be quiet handy in trying to talk Sony and MS over to the blue team if Raja manages to make a decent product for intel before the next console refresh cycle.
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In the past these companies generally make peanuts on consoles.
 
This has to be under a non-compete clause in his contract from AMD. Wonder what that cost to buyout?
 
just because they *might* be making a discrete GPU card, does not mean it is intended for gaming. More likely the work station or GPU compute areas like the nvidia tesla, etc.
 
I think Intel already has the patent licensing set up for GPUs. AMD and Intel have a lot of cross-licensing agreements and Intel and Nvidia have an agreement on GPU patents as well.

It is a bit weird that Chris Hook is now being tapped to market a product that as of this time doesn't exist. The last Intel discrete GPU was the i740 and that came out about 20 years ago.
 
I can honestly say that I am excited about Intel getting into the discrete graphics game. I seriously hope it leads to very high-end performance parts. nVidia is making a ton of money in many different markets with their products and I can't imagine there isn't room for someone else.

But ......

White noise for most of us. Show us the numbers. We don't care about marketing which most of the time is a lie in disguise, or names, titles, promises, road maps, rumors, yada yada yada ......

Show me the MF'ing performance numbers.

If and when that time comes, if it looks good, I'll open my check book and hand AMD a check, or Intel.

Started building PC's from Computer Shopper in the very early 90's coming up on 30 years now back when you had patch wires all over the backside of motherboards and to jumper your own DMA and IRQ's to get stuff working.

If there is one segment of the PC industry that makes a whole helluva lot of noise it's gotta be from these graphic card companies. There is no way I can be the only one that's fatigued and worn down from all the constant bs promises and expectations year after year after year.
 
For those saying its good that Chris left, you have to realize that marketing is more than just hype. I for one like the AMD style of their marketing. Intel's marketing is so plain and simple they NEED the change. AMD I hope can reproduce the marketing they had with Chris. He also is not necessarily responsible for the screw ups of trying to push products.....if it under performs is it the marketing departments fault? The answer is No. They did their job to get products sold.
 
Part of deal included making sure the GPU will have a bug that requires a fix that will greatly slow it down making it obsolete...but the next gen will have a built in fix with no slow down so no fear, you can just buy a new one. (Sort of sarcasm.)
 
The only reasonable explanation for me is that he was hired for his contacts/acquaintances; all these decades inside the greasing machine, he's bound to have plenty of them. And that's about it.
They're brewing something new, but not for the first time; and since last time, well, let's just say it didn't go that well, this time around they know that even IF it does, they'll still need to push it hard.
Now to push a product, you need grasp the relevant audience's attention; to do that, you need the outlets, media and key "figures" that control/shape said audience. It being where Hook comes in, the greasing.

This is just your random nobody (me) speculating; but i've had a swim or two with the sharks in my career and can tell you (for what little it's worth) that i'm pretty sure this is why. In its own way, this can be as important (or not) as Raja's hiring. There's a limited pool of 'influencing' parties out there, all with their affiliations, allegiances, priorities, etc. To bring them over them does not only entail having more PR capital in your pocket; it also entails the opposition's having less of it. You hire Hook, you hire his contacts :)
 
As on of the responses says, marketing isn't just promotion. It's the 4/6/7 P's. Marketing would generally be informing engineering about what the market is demanding so that it informs roadmaps.


Knowing the industry, having the contacts, customer groups, what's possible etc etc are just as important as being able to walk in and tell your employer that your company sold everything it made, even if that was as down to great mining performance.

Plus ya know, it's obviously Raja that tapped him. Working with a known quantity is a massive benefit. The guy who works for the rich dominant company could be shit as much as the guy who works for the small resource starved competitor is amazing. It's hard to judge based on a resume and a couple of interviews but if you know them...
 
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