Ex AMD Director of Technical Marketing Robert Hallock has joined Intel as Senior Director of Technical Marketing after a sabbatical. During his sabbatical, Hallock ran his own company that focused on aftermarket car mods. Hallock had a 12 year tenure at AMD and was the face of many of AMD's more technical videos and also took part in some keynote product instructions when it came to the more technical details of product introductions.

According to a post by Hallock on LinkedIn, his new position will apparently focus on AI for consumer processors, something that ties in with what Intel is about to announce at Intel Innovation 2023. As such, we might be seeing Hallock doing some of the presentations at Intel Innovation 2023 in September. Hallocks post on LinkedIn talks about AI accelerators, again suggesting that he will be mainly involved with the ex Movidius team, but as he mentions client computing, his responsibility might still extend outside of just the AI side of things. Time will tell if he gets a similar role at Intel as he had at AMD, or if he'll just be one of many directors at the company.

Intel Innovation is Intel's yearly tech conference and the company has revealed some of what it'll share at the event that kicks off on the 19th of September. One of the sessions at the event is called Intel Client Hardware Roadmap and the Rise of AI and during that event, Intel will be sharing its latest "client hardware platforms" which according to the session blurb will include the upcoming Intel Core Ultra processors which currently goes under the codename of Meteor Lake.

It's unclear how much detail Intell will go into and based on the subject of the session, this should most likely be focused on the desktop platform, but could also cover the mobile parts. According to VideoCardz we should expect Intel to detail the integrated VPU which is said to be based on hardware from Movidius, a company Intel acquired a few years ago and that focused on making machine learning hardware. The VPU should be a low-power accelerator that handles AI inference tasks that will be part of at least some future Intel processors, but for now, we don't really know what Intel's plans are for these types of features in its CPUs, apart from offering something competitive with AMD's Xilinx derived AI Engine.

Intel has quietly canceled its Thunder Bay hybrid system-on-chip (SoC) that combines standard general-purpose CPU Cores and Movidius Vision Processing Unit (VPU) cores. Such chips were aimed at commercial and Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications that relied on computer vision acceleration and edge-computing applications. According to the latest report, it appears that Thunder Bay is canceled as Intel has released a set of patches that removed the Thunder Bay code from the Linux kernel.

Intel kept Thunder bay details well hidden and while earlier rumors pointed to a combination of Intel Xeon x86 CPU cores and Movidius VPU cores, the only Thunder Bay support in Linux patches where showing a combination of ARM Cortex-A53 low-power cores with the Movidius VPU. Intel acquired Movidius back in 2016 and while it is not something that Intel talks about often, there are several products based on Movidius VPUs, including Neural Compute Stick, Intel drones, the Intel RealSense Tracking Camera, and most recently, the Intel Movidius 3700VC VPU, formerly Keem Bay. In any case, it appears that Intel is abandoning an idea of combining general purpose x86 CPU cores and Movidius VPU cores.