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Intel Talent Bleed Continues (theregister.com)

(Friday September 12, 2025 @11:30PM (BeauHD) from the better-and-brighter-opportunities dept.)


Intel's long-time Xeon chief architect Ronak Singhal is [1]leaving the company after nearly 30 years , marking yet another [2]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 [3]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.



[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/11/intel_loses_chief_architect/

[2] https://slashdot.org/story/25/09/09/213214/intel-ousts-ceo-of-products-ending-30-year-career

[3] https://slashdot.org/story/25/09/09/213214/intel-ousts-ceo-of-products-ending-30-year-career



Not sure it is a brain drain! (Score:4, Insightful)

by oldgraybeard ( 2939809 )

Has been my experience technical people moving into management(CEO jobs in this case) don't want to do the creative/technical end any longer and are going for the money.

Re:Not sure it is a brain drain! (Score:4, Insightful)

by oldgraybeard ( 2939809 )

The real question is, Do they have other talent taking the opportunity to step up. And will new management recognize it, if/when it happens.

Re: (Score:1)

by Anonymous Coward

Intel is in the shitter for exactly the opposite reason. Engineers no longer run the company.

Intel has lost a huge lead... (Score:3)

by garyisabusyguy ( 732330 )

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

So Intel and Nvidia both (Score:2)

by rsilvergun ( 571051 )

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.

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

Witness (Score:2)

by RitchCraft ( 6454710 )

I believe we may be witnessing the beginning of the end for Intel unfortunately. How the mighty has fallen.

> valerie kernel: mtrr: your CPUs had inconsistent variable MTRR settings
> valerie kernel: mtrr: probably your BIOS does not setup all CPUs

It indicates your bios authors can't read standards. Thats a quite normal
state of affairs, so common that the kernel cleans up after them

- Alan Cox on linux-kernel