Exclusive: Intel Is Losing Its Second Xeon Chief Architect This Year

With his impending departure, Ronak Singhal will mark the second Xeon chief architect Intel has lost in roughly eight months as CEO Lip-Bu Tan pushes for changes to revitalize its data center business, including the appointment of a new business leader.

Intel is losing its second Xeon CPU chief architect this year as CEO Lip-Bu Tan pushes for changes to revitalize its data center business, CRN has learned.

Colleagues were recently informed that Ronak Singhal, Intel senior fellow and chief architect of Xeon products, is leaving the semiconductor giant at the end of the month, according to sources familiar with the situation who asked to not be identified because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.

With his impending departure, Singhal will mark the second Xeon chief architect Intel has lost in roughly eight months after Sailesh Kottapalli, who was also an Intel senior fellow, left the company in January to help lead Qualcomm’s revitalized server CPU efforts.

After the publication of this article, Intel confirmed to CRN that Singhal is leaving the company but declined to comment further. Singhal declined to comment.

A former Intel colleague called Singhal a “titan of the industry” who “has done more to advance the x86 architecture than anyone I can think of.”

“Customers respect him a lot, and I think they will view it as one more loss of someone who understands their requirements,” said the colleague, who asked to not be identified to speak candidly about their former employer.

Most recently, Singhal has led the company’s overall road map, technology strategy and product management for Xeon server CPUs. Singhal told CRN in a February interview that product management was a responsibility he was more recently given.

According to his LinkedIn page, his responsibility didn’t just cover products but platforms and a myriad of associated technologies such as memory, security and AI for Xeon.

Previously, Singhal led server architecture development for the “Haswell” and “Broadwell” CPUs, the latter of which was the company’s first 14-nanometer server chip, he said on his LinkedIn page. He also led development of the “CPU core intellectual property” for the Intel’s Xeon, Core and Atom processors.

Earlier in his Intel career, Singhal “led the overall performance efforts” on the “Nehalem” and “Westmere” CPU architectures. Prior to that, he focused on performance analysis and validation for the company’s Pentium 4 processors.

Tan Names New Data Center Group Leader As He Seeks Changes

Singhal’s departure is coming as Tan appointed a new leader in the chief architect’s business unit, the Data Center Group, and pushes for changes within the division to revitalize its server CPU business. These changes are part of a large shake-up Tan has made to the company over the past several months, which included a 15 percent cut in the company’s workforce as part of a move to make Intel act faster as an organization.

Intel on Monday announced two-year Arm executive Kevork Kechichian as the new executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group. Tan reorganized the business unit earlier this year to focus mainly on CPUs after moving responsibilities for Intel’s accelerator chip efforts under a new group led by executive Sachin Katti.

Intel’s server CPU business has been one of Tan’s priorities since he became Intel’s CEO in March, with the division facing increasing competition from AMD along with companies such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Nvidia developing Arm-based CPUs for cloud and AI infrastructure.

In his first public remarks as Intel’s CEO in late March, Tan said the company needs to “strengthen” its data center offerings and admitted that Intel needs to “recruit some of the best talent in the industry to come back” as part of his push for the chipmaker to become an “engineering-focused company.”

“We lost quite a bit of talent,” he said.

Tan then told employees in a late July memo that the company is “focused on regaining” server CPU market share as it ramps the Xeon 6 P-core chips, code-named “Granite Rapids,” while also “improving our capabilities for hyperscale workloads.”

“To support this, we are reintroducing simultaneous multi-threading (SMT),” he wrote. “Moving away from SMT put us at a competitive disadvantage. Bringing it back will help us close performance gaps.”

In late August, Intel CFO David Zinsner said it will take a “multi-year process” for the company to make big competitive moves in the business, saying that its “Diamond Rapids” server product line due for launch next year “doesn’t get us quite there.”

“In certain cases the performance is actually better, but in other cases it’s not. And so we’ve got more work to do to finally get to a place,” he said.

Zinsner called the successor to “Diamond Rapids,” code-named “Coral Rapids,” the “real opportunity” that will let Intel “take a really good step forward.”