If Intel was hoping for a turnaround in 2025, it will have to wait at least a little bit longer. The chief architect for Intel’s Xeon server processors has defected to chip rival Qualcomm, which is making yet another run at entering the data center market.
Sailesh Kottapalli, a 28-year Intel veteran and a senior fellow and chief architect for the company’s Xeon processors, made the announcement on LinkedIn on January 13, stating that he joined Qualcomm as a senior vice president.
“My journey took me through roles as a validation engineer, logic designer, full-chip floor planner, post-silicon debug engineer, micro architect, and architect,” he wrote. “I worked on CPU cores, memory, IO, and platform aspects of the system, spanning multiple architectures across x86 and Itanium, and products including CPU and GPU, most importantly shaping the Xeon product line.”
Regarding the Xeon, Kottapalli wrote “While there is never a suitable time to end a journey, I feel good about where Xeon is right now and what is coming up next.”
This is not Qualcomm’s first try at server CPUs. Last decade, the company developed a line of chips called Centriq but abandoned those efforts in 2018 and laid off its development team. More recently, the company acquired a company called Nuvia in 2021 for $1.4 billion.
Nuvia originally designed an Arm-based server CPU called Phoenix (now called Oryon) cores with servers in mind, but Qualcomm uses them for Snapdragon X system-on-chips (SoC) for consumer PCs, which led to a lawsuit between Qualcomm and Arm.
The lawsuit ended in a mistrial in late December after a jury sided with Qualcomm on two key issues but deadlocked on a third. Arm has said it plans to pursue a retrial.
Source:: Network World