Tom Forsyth Joins Intel Again – Larrabee Architect Returns

By Nathan Kirsch

The Intel GPU team under Raja Koduri continues to grow as they have now hired Tom Forsyth. That name might be familiar to some of our readers as he was considered the man behind Intel’s ambitious Larrabee project from a decade ago. Larrabee was never primarily a graphics card, because the top brass at Intel didn’t want one. Intel wants to make a run at the discrete graphics market now and hopes to have a product to sell in 2020.

In a tweet, Forsyth confirmed that he will be returning to Intel as a GPU chip architect under Raja Koduri in the Core and Visual Computing Group. Forsyth admitted that he is not sure what he’ll be working on just yet, but we are sure that Raja will clear that up once he has started. Tom Forsyth has always said that Larrabee was not a failure and he explains on his blog why it wasn’t a flop. After Intel, Forsyth spent time at Oculus and Valve where he worked on a number of VR-related projects like bringing the Oculus Rift to market and writing large portions of the Team Fortress VR code for Valve. You can check out Tom’s VR papers here.

Tom Forsyth - Intel Larrabee

Intel also recently hired former AMD Senior Director, Chris Hook who will be be sure the right message is making it out on Intel’s upcoming discrete graphics products. Some believe that Intel will be announcing something with regards to discrete graphics at CES 2019, but if that is true it will be obviously something that Intel has been working on for some time. Intel is still making hires and putting its discrete GPU team together.