This is rather surprising - but then again, he worked closely with Raja Koduri before, and he is definitely one of the top guys in the industry when it comes to guerrilla marketing and graphics marketing overall.

He managed to make a lot of trouble for  Nvidia’s team with very little resources, and with Intel support, he might make some good and massive changes in the way things are done in Intel graphics marketing in the future.

Discrete graphics marketing

Chris is going to lead marketing for visual technologies and dGFX products at Intel. To our knowledge, he will be the first discrete graphics marketing person at Intel. Yes, Intel is making discrete graphics products and we have reported about that before,  but it might take some time.

He will be driving astrategy across verticals and work on the eventual launch of discrete graphics products. Hook was the chap who helped to organize the Hawaii launch in, er,  Hawaii, and this was definitely one of the most memorable graphics events in the short history of discrete GPU launches.

We see him more as a competitor to Nvidia than to AMD, as this the primary target that Intel wants to address with its discrete graphics parts. AMD will also be caught in the crossfire, but will not be the primary target. It might take some time for Intel to make a discrete part, but this is the most serious that the company has ever been about graphics in the last decade.

We asked around in the discrete graphics market, and many people believe that Intel can make both software and hardware and tackle both Nvidia and AMD, it just won’t happen overnight.