Qualcomm lured away the chief architect of Intel Xeon server processors

Sailesh Kottapalli, who worked at Intel for 28 years and most recently served as a senior scientist and chief architect for Xeon server processors, said he has taken a job at Qualcomm. The company is forming a new division that will take it into the data center processor market.

Image source: qualcomm.com

The Intel veteran left the company to take the position of senior vice president at Qualcomm. “The opportunity to innovate and grow while helping us explore new horizons has become extremely attractive to me. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity and I couldn’t miss it,” Sailesh Kottapalli wrote on professional networking site LinkedIn. Before becoming the Chief Xeon Architect at Intel, he served as the lead engineer for Itanium and Xeon chips.

Earlier it became known that Qualcomm had a vacancy for a specialist in the security architecture of a server system on a chip. The description stated that the data center division is developing “high-performance and energy-efficient server solutions for data center systems,” including “reference platforms” based on Snapdragon chips. The new specialist was to lead the development of “system architecture for confidential computing in data center products.” In recent years, confidential computing has become a standard feature of Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC processors.

In 2021, Qualcomm acquired Nuvia, which developed its own Arm-compatible CPU core architecture, for $1.4 billion. Qualcomm said it plans to use this architecture in several areas, including laptops, smartphones, automotive systems, augmented reality and networking solutions. The company also said last year that it intends to continue developing processors for the data center, as Nuvia had originally planned.