NVIDIA recently acquired Rafi Marom, Intel Design Manager at the company's Israel facility. Marom was one of the managers who assisted in the Tiger Lake architecture. NVIDIA will keep Marom in the same region but will promote him to Senior CPU Director and at the forefront of the future of the company's Arm-based technologies.
Intel's Rafi Marom is now working in a prominent position at rival NVIDIA for the company's Arm products
With NVIDIA losing the acquisition of Arm Technologies, the company appears to be increasing the already based Arm core designs currently in development. Arm's strategy with its chip design is to create a single chip or technology that can work across several products and partners. In contrast, NVIDIA demands that each of its designs have distinct objectives.
Acquiring rival company employees is not a new practice by any means. Lately, it has been crucial for companies to gain other figures from their competition to help further future projects in the industry. The biggest issue is finding the right people for each of the individual areas of the company. Several companies have reported that in hiring after the large part of the pandemic, employees were not fully qualified, which caused projects to slow down. So, making a better offer to a competitor's staff is adequate and efficient in the long run. Also, it then causes the rival company to have to replace that position with someone who was just as qualified, if not more, at a faster rate.
NVIDIA should gain from Marom's experience that he used at Intel to design next-gen, Arm-based processors and processor technologies for the company. In fact, after the Grace Hopper launch, NVIDIA's newest superchip utilizes up to 72 Neoverse-based v9 cores from Arm technologies and is stated to perform ten times more efficiently than x86 processor technologies.
Intel did not go unnoticed during the acquisition, as the company prepared a multi-billion dollar strategy to entice new employees to the company. This move was also to halt further instances like this from appearing.
Last August, Intel had poached Anton Kaplanyan, Meta's Lead Research Scientist at Reality Labs and former NVIDIA Research Scientist that pioneered RTX/DLSS techniques.
