NVIDIA recently acquired Rafi Marom, Intel Design Manager
In September 2020, Nvidia announced the purchase of Arm from SoftBank for $40 billion in cash and stock. After a long tug-of-war with relevant regulators, Nvidia’s ambitious plans were hit, and on February 8 this year, Nvidia officially abandoned the acquisition of Arm.
In fact, Nvidia had already started creating a CPU design and engineering team in Israel before abandoning the acquisition of Arm, with plans to recruit hundreds of engineers, including hardware, software, and architecture talent, and conduct R&D work with other networking and HPC technology-related teams. According to Wccftech, Nvidia has recently poached Intel’s design manager Rafi Marom. The architect who has participated in the development of Tiger Lake and Alder lake will serve as Nvidia’s senior CPU director. Rafi Marom will continue to stay in Israel and become one of the main leaders of NVIDIA’s Arm architecture CPU research and development in the future.
With the intensified market competition in the semiconductor industry and the lack of high-level technical personnel, mutual poaching has become a common way to find talents, which can not only enhance one’s own strength but also weaken the competitiveness of the other party. In order to reduce the turnover rate of employees and attract new talents, Intel has previously approved $2.4 billion ($1 billion in cash + $1.4 billion in stock) to motivate employees, including but not limited to compensation structure, increasing performance budget, providing differentiated bonuses for outstanding performers, increasing stock allocation, etc. Although Intel has attracted former AMD chief GPU architect Raja Koduri, and Anton Kaplanyan, who was responsible for the development of DLSS technology, this does not seem to completely prevent competitors from poaching.
