A couple of years ago, Lisa Spelman, whose experience in Intel structures exceeds twenty years, held the position of corporate vice president and head of Intel Xeon products, but she later left the company. Starting from August this year, she is going to head the startup Cornelis Networks, partly controlled by Intel Corporation.
Image Source: Intel
In fact, for Lisa Spelman this is a kind of return, although this startup structurally separated from Intel back in 2020. The young company develops technologies for data exchange between various servers aimed at solving common problems. In conditions of high demand for artificial intelligence systems, such technologies should be in demand by the market. At the very least, the technologies being developed by Cornelis Networks can be considered competitors for the Infiniband interface promoted by Nvidia after purchasing the Israeli company Mellanox in 2020. Initially, the Omni-Path interface was developed by Intel for use in server systems, but in the end this technology went to the startup Cornelis Networks, which continued its evolutionary development. In the current TOP500 rating, the share of systems using this interface made by Cornelis does not exceed 1%.
Lisa Spelman will begin her new job on August 15, becoming the CEO of Cornelis Networks. Her predecessor and Cornelis co-founder Philip Murphy will move to the position of chief operating officer of the startup as a result of this appointment. Intel owns a small stake in Cornelis Networks. Lisa Spelman is committed to offering the technology the startup is developing to both large cloud service providers and enterprise customers building their own data centers. Spelman estimates the capacity of this market segment at $20 billion. Intel itself can share clients with Cornelis. In addition, rival AMD also uses Cornelis services.