Sailesh Kottapalli, a high-profile engineer who has been at Intel since 1996 and has held such important positions as Director of the Data Center Processor Architecture and Platform Engineering Group, has been hired by Qualcomm.
Intel’s corporate situation is not going through its best moments and is being used by the rest of its competitors. By AMD to ‘eat’ market share in processors or by NVIDIA to increase its presence in servers with its accelerators. Qualcomm is another that wants to propose alternatives to the x86 architecture with its ARM for PCs and it has even been rumored that it would be willing to Buy Intel in what will be the largest operation in the history of technology.
The potential acquisition would represent an important strategic change for Qualcomm, diversifying its portfolio and strengthening its position in a changing technological landscape that is now guided by everything that speaks and smells of Artificial Intelligence, as we have seen at the recent CES.
Sailesh Kottapalli came to Qualcomm
In this situation, It is not unusual for engineers or high-level executives to change sides towards what they consider a safer destination. Kottapalli announced the job change yesterday with a post on LinkedIn in which he wrote that his new job represents a «opportunity to innovate and grow while helping to scale new frontiers and a unique opportunity in my career that I could not pass up».
The farewell post doesn’t detail what he’ll be working on at Qualcomm, but we assume It will be a position of the highest technical level considering that Kottapalli was the current head of data center architecture at Intel (hardly at all) and was responsible for the development of some series of Intel Xeon processors.
The hypotheticals Qualcomm server chips ARM-powered devices could require less power than their x86 rivals from Intel and be cheaper in total operating costs. Or maybe Kottapalli would help Qualcomm work on AI acceleratorsa field in which it also has experience and which is in the maximum deployment phase mainly due to NVIDIA solutions.
