Intel Appoints Sales and Engineering Leaders

[Nomad76]

Intel today announced a series of leadership appointments aligned with its focus on strengthening customer relationships and becoming a more engineering-focused company. Greg Ernst, a respected sales leader with more than 20 years of Intel experience, has been named chief revenue officer. In addition, Srinivasan Iyengar, Jean-Didier Allegrucci and Shailendra Desai are joining Intel in key engineering leadership roles.

"We see significant opportunities ahead to strengthen our product offerings and meet the changing needs of our customers," said Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Intel. "Greg, Srini, J-D and Shailendra are highly accomplished leaders with strong reputations across our ecosystem, and they will each play important roles as we position our business for the future."



Ernst has been leading Intel's Sales and Marketing Group (SMG) since May. He is known as a customer-focused leader with a deep understanding of the market and has held a wide range of global sales, marketing and product development roles through his career. Prior to his most recent position, he led SMG across the Americas. Ernst continues to report to Tan.

Iyengar has been named SVP and Fellow. He will lead a new customer engineering center of excellence and join the Intel Executive Team, reporting to Tan. He joins Intel from Cadence Design Systems, where he led global silicon engineering. Iyengar brings extensive experience and expertise in helping customers create best-in-class custom silicon, including a deep focus on hyperscale data center solutions optimized for key workloads.

Allegrucci has been named VP of AI System on Chip (SoC) Engineering. He will be responsible for managing the development of multiple SoCs that will be part of Intel's AI roadmap. He joins from Rain AI, an innovative startup where he led AI silicon engineering. Prior to joining Rain, he spent 17 years at Apple where he oversaw the development of more than 30 SoCs used across many of the company's flagship products.

Desai has been named VP of AI Fabric and Networking. He will lead the development of innovative SoC architectures for Intel's AI GPUs and forward-looking roadmap. He joins from Google, where he led silicon engineering, architectural design and platform solutions across multiple mobile SoCs. He was previously the founder and CEO of Provino Technologies, an SoC startup acquired by Google in 2021.

Both Allegrucci and Desai will report to Sachin Katti, Intel's chief technology and AI officer.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site | Source

 

[Daven]

What happened over at Intel? I would love to watch a movie about their rise and fall. I mean most of the technology world was too afraid even to speak the Intel company name in vain in the somewhat recent past. Now they keep firing and hiring people as if they don't know how to market the products they have been selling since the 1970s. This is all very confusing. Maybe everyone good was poached by other companies or left during Covid and now Intel is almost like a startup again.

 

[Nomad76]

What happened over at Intel? I would love to watch a movie about their rise and fall. I mean most of the technology world was too afraid even to speak the Intel company name in vain in the somewhat recent past. Now they keep firing and hiring people as if they don't know how to market the products they have been selling since the 1970s. This is all very confusing. Maybe everyone good was poached by other companies or left during Covid and now Intel is almost like a startup again.

Well, you cannot lay off 20% of your fab workers and not mix with the execs. Plus, I didn't randomly choose that picture

 

[Daven]

Well, you cannot lay off 20% of your fab workers and not mix with the execs. Plus, I didn't randomly choose that picture

I guess I could channel Michael Dell and say that Intel should '...shutdown and return all the money to the shareholders.' But I've seen companies return from the brink of death that were far worse off than Intel is now. Let's see what they can pull off now that they can no longer rely on manipulating the market through anti-competitive behavior. That's Nvidia's job now.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

What happened over at Intel? I would love to watch a movie about their rise and fall. I mean most of the technology world was too afraid even to speak the Intel company name in vain in the somewhat recent past. Now they keep firing and hiring people as if they don't know how to market the products they have been selling since the 1970s. This is all very confusing. Maybe everyone good was poached by other companies or left during Covid and now Intel is almost like a startup again.

Short story is that Intel fostered a culture that was comprised of seniority elitism and boomer esqe "we've always done it this way" that utterly crushed competition, then paired it with a bloated middle management system that was steeped deep in workplace politics and nepotism. Any ideas that were too revolutionary or risky got hammered. The management was also very structured, to the point that the rigidness got in the way of fixing problems, with any solution stuck in endless committees.

This resulted in a decade+ of very conservative business decisions that limited the evolution of intels hardware and drove all the young hungry engineers to other companies.

Fast forward, AMD hits it big with Jim Keller's Zen architecture (Keller would try to help intel but left in less than a year, tells you a lot) and started eating Intel's pie. Zen 2 showed remarkable improvement. Since then, intel has constantly been at least a step behind AMD at every turn, after alder lake came out they stalled for 2 generations while AMD pushed out the x3d and got zen 4 going. Zen 5 brought huge improvements in AVX512, something intel abandoned on its consumer chips because they couldnt get it to work.

Further compounding this has been intel foundry being unable to get new nodes working right. Both 14nm and 10nm faced big delays and sub 10nm has been stalled out for a long time. Now the biggest benefit to intel's arrow lake is being on TSMC's node instead of their own, but that just shows how far behind their core design really is, even with a node advantage they struggle to keep up and draw way more power in the process.

The new leadership hit the panic button and began laying off huge percentages of their workforce to maintain profits, but that is unsustainable. You're seeing deck chairs moving on the itanic now, perhaps they will find a winning strategy, perhaps not.

 

[Daven]

Short story is that Intel fostered a culture that was comprised of seniority elitism and boomer esqe "we've always done it this way" that utterly crushed competition, then paired it with a bloated middle management system that was steeped deep in workplace politics and nepotism. Any ideas that were too revolutionary or risky got hammered. The management was also very structured, to the point that the rigidness got in the way of fixing problems, with any solution stuck in endless committees.

This resulted in a decade+ of very conservative business decisions that limited the evolution of intels hardware and drove all the young hungry engineers to other companies.

Fast forward, AMD hits it big with Jim Keller's Zen architecture (Keller would try to help intel but left in less than a year, tells you a lot) and started eating Intel's pie. Zen 2 showed remarkable improvement. Since then, intel has constantly been at least a step behind AMD at every turn, after alder lake came out they stalled for 2 generations while AMD pushed out the x3d and got zen 4 going. Zen 5 brought huge improvements in AVX512, something intel abandoned on its consumer chips because they couldnt get it to work.

Further compounding this has been intel foundry being unable to get new nodes working right. Both 14nm and 10nm faced big delays and sub 10nm has been stalled out for a long time. Now the biggest benefit to intel's arrow lake is being on TSMC's node instead of their own, but that just shows how far behind their core design really is, even with a node advantage they struggle to keep up and draw way more power in the process.

The new leadership hit the panic button and began laying off huge percentages of their workforce to maintain profits, but that is unsustainable. You're seeing deck chairs moving on the itanic now, perhaps they will find a winning strategy, perhaps not.

That is an excellent summary. It really captures the decay and decline.

 

[Visible Noise]

Fast forward, AMD hits it big with Jim Keller's Zen architecture (Keller would try to help intel but left in less than a year, tells you a lot) and started eating Intel's pie.

This is a myth - and your timeline is flat out wrong.

Jim Keller had minimal input into Zen. The timeframe of his employment doesn’t line up. He was responsible for the cancelled K12.

He left Intel after over two years to help care for his cancer stricken sister.

 

[LittleBro]

This is a myth - and your timeline is flat out wrong.

Works on Zen and K12 started prior to 2015 (when Keller left AMD).

Jim Keller had minimal input into Zen. The timeframe of his employment doesn’t line up. He was responsible for the cancelled K12.

Keller have done some work on Zen, but the key architect of Zen architect is Mike Clark.

He left Intel after over two years to help care for his cancer stricken sister.

And due to his personal disagreement with Intel's extension of outsourcing.

 

[Daven]

The lore surrounding Jim Keller is hilarious. I won’t be surprised if some think that Keller secretly runs AMD from a base on the dark side of the moon.

Ask anyone what Keller did and when and you would get a different answer per person.