Intel Talent Bleed Continues

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.

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