Intel graphics and marketing chief Chris Hook leaves 18 months after joining from AMD

Comments

Chris Hook, the long-time AMD marketing veteran who jumped ship to Intel last year, has revealed he has now quit Intel just 18 months into his tenure.

He confirmed his own departure on Twitter in response to a question from Mark Hachman, editor at PCWorld, saying “I did, following other ex graphics brethren like @HeatherJLennon and @Dr_jonnyfever. You’ll be hearing more about my next gig shortly. Now for some rest and Turkey.”

Heather J Lennon was the senior marketing manager for Intel graphics while Jon Carvill was vice president of marketing and technology leadership at Intel. Lennon, Carvill and Hook have all left Intel, supposedly to join a new tech startup, which does leave plenty of question marks hanging over Intel’s PC graphics program. 

Hook was a loyal employee at AMD for a heck of a long time, starting as a senior ASIC product manager back in 1996 before eventually becoming the senior director of global product marketing at AMD and overseeing Team Red’s recent attempts to regain the gaming market share with AMD Ryzen and Radeon Vega from Intel and Nvidia respectively. He left AMD in April 2019 after 22 years with ATI/AMD, joining Intel to work on “Discrete Graphics Marketing”. And now, just 18 months later, he’s parted way with Intel.

It all leaves us really in the dark as to what may be going on at Intel in regards to its graphics division. Intel has made its intentions clear, aiming for a 2020 launch for its first desktop graphics cards. Losing a trio of top executives in one fell swoop is certainly odd though. They’ve either had their heads turned by a nice proposition or there may be some internal dealings which we’re not privy to. Whatever it is, Intel hasn’t got particularly long to get all of its ducks in a row – both Arctic Sound and Ponte Vecchio GPUs based on the Xe architecture are expected to roll out in the near future.