Intel Talent Bleed Continues (theregister.com) 16
Intel's long-time Xeon chief architect Ronak Singhal is leaving the company after nearly 30 years, marking yet another high-profile departure amid Intel's leadership churn and intensifying competition from AMD and Arm-based cloud CPUs. The Register reports: The Carnegie Mellon alum holds degrees in electrical and computer engineering, along with at least 30 patents involving CPUs. Singhal joined Intel in 1997 after spending the previous summer as an intern at Cyrix. After a year in Intel's Rotation Engineers Program, he spent the remainder of his tenure helping to develop some of the chipmaker's most consequential and, at times, controversial processors. Most notably, Singhal oversaw the core development of Intel's 22nm Haswell and 14nm Broadwell processor architectures. His innovations aren't limited to the datacenter either, with his architectural contributions playing a significant role in the success of Intel's Core and Atom processor families as well. [...]
Singhal is only the latest Xeon lead to jump ship since the start of the year. In January, Sailesh Kottapalli, another senior fellow, left for Qualcomm barely a month after former CEO Pat Gelsinger's unceremonious "retirement." Even before Gelsinger's eviction, Intel's datacenter group has been something of a revolving door. Last summer Singhal's long-time colleague Lisa Spelman departed the company, eventually landing a spot as CEO of HPC interconnect vendor Cornelis Networks. Her replacement, Ryan Tabrah, lasted seven months in the role, about half as long as Intel datacenter boss Justin Hotard, who defected for the forests of Finland to lead Nokia as its new President and CEO back in April.
In fact, the churn now extends all the way to the top. On Monday, Intel announced its CEO of Products, Michelle Johnston Holthaus, would be leaving the business. The move is part of a broader executive shakeup that will see former Arm engineer Kevork Kechichian take over as head of Intel's datacenter engineering group. Jim Johnson, meanwhile, will take over as head of the chipmaker's client computing group while Srinivasan (Srini) Iyengar will head up a new central engineering division.
Singhal is only the latest Xeon lead to jump ship since the start of the year. In January, Sailesh Kottapalli, another senior fellow, left for Qualcomm barely a month after former CEO Pat Gelsinger's unceremonious "retirement." Even before Gelsinger's eviction, Intel's datacenter group has been something of a revolving door. Last summer Singhal's long-time colleague Lisa Spelman departed the company, eventually landing a spot as CEO of HPC interconnect vendor Cornelis Networks. Her replacement, Ryan Tabrah, lasted seven months in the role, about half as long as Intel datacenter boss Justin Hotard, who defected for the forests of Finland to lead Nokia as its new President and CEO back in April.
In fact, the churn now extends all the way to the top. On Monday, Intel announced its CEO of Products, Michelle Johnston Holthaus, would be leaving the business. The move is part of a broader executive shakeup that will see former Arm engineer Kevork Kechichian take over as head of Intel's datacenter engineering group. Jim Johnson, meanwhile, will take over as head of the chipmaker's client computing group while Srinivasan (Srini) Iyengar will head up a new central engineering division.
Not sure it is a brain drain! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not sure it is a brain drain! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Not sure it is a brain drain! (Score:4, Insightful)
A bit less for digital circuits though. More relevant for analog and process people.
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Intel is in the shitter for exactly the opposite reason. Engineers no longer run the company.
Intel has lost a huge lead... (Score:3)
in semiconductor technology, and chip implementations over the past 20 years
IMO, They really should be looking at cleaning house and restarting with new thought leaders if they want to regain their former glory, or else they will go the way of Motorola chasing discrete components and niche markets
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Who is this "they" you are speaking of?
The leaders of the company? Who seem to be churning nowadays.
The most talented people in the company? Who seem to be the ones bleeding away nowadays. For better pastures or retirement or whatever.
The rest of the people who work at Intel? I suspect they don't have what it takes to run the place and push it forward. That's why companies have all of the above.
The shareholders? Mostly they have no idea, they are just investing for profit, they will move elsewhere.
Who is th
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This seems like the natural life cycle of a business.
They start out with a great idea, low prices, and try to make the world a better place. They rise in market share and power, and soon, greed starts to creep in. Prices go up and quality goes down. They stop caring about employees or customers. Eventually, customers start to move on to other new companies that still care about them.
Intel has a choice. They can either go back to their roots, or slowly die. Either option works for me.
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Yep, without having any detailed knowledge of that company the question is do you keep the folks who presided over the slow demise of Intel? Or were they talented people caught in an unforgiving corporate hierarchy.
I know folks on /. like to elevate engineers and technical folks, but once you've been around the block a few times you see that tech folks are just as susceptible to being sucked into stagnating corporate culture as the next person. My hope for Intel is that they are able to use this opport
So Intel and Nvidia both (Score:2)
Obviously Nvidia is still doing that today.
But as far as Intel goes letting go of that much engineering talent is asking to get buried further.
I don't think that they have enough of a hold on that market that they can count on their usual antitrust violation tactics to stave off the damage
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Made a habit of hiring engineers at high salaries whether they needed them or not so they're competitors couldn't get them.
Obviously Nvidia is still doing that today.
In its early days, Nvidia would make lists of the key technical people at its competitors and hire those people. This led to a significant competitive advantage.
Hiring people is inherently neither good nor bad. It depends on the specific people and the situations at the company. Hiring unneeded workers is not a good thing, albeit not necessarily bad unless those unneeded workers displace needed workers. Keeping key people away from your competitors is usually an advantage.
Good people need to be in key posit
Witness (Score:3)
I believe we may be witnessing the beginning of the end for Intel unfortunately. How the mighty has fallen.
Re: Witness (Score:2)
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Yeah, because Nvidia definitely isn't trying to eat x86-64's lunch with their Jetson line of aarch64 based offerings that outperform low-wattage x86-64 at a cheaper price, in a much easier modular design that saves you time and money on device integration, are they?
Here's a hint: I just got done doing a comparison of Jetson Orin Nano against AMD Ryzen Embedded V3000 for an upcoming product. In every scenario, the AMD CPU used more power while delivering less performance and features with the single excepti
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Intel Support Genocide in Palestine (Score:1)
I commend Intel employees who have grown a conscience and sought employment elsewhere.