Analysis: Intel CEO’s Hiring Strategy Reflects Big Bet On ASICs

When Intel hired Marvell Technology executive Dean Jarnac, the company called out ASICs as one of the key areas for which the new sales leader is expected to strengthen customer relationships and go-to-market execution.

When Lip-Bu Tan appointed Marvell executive Dean Jarnac to lead Intel’s sales organization in August, the move reflected the pressure the CEO is feeling to keep revenue growing, his knack for hiring outsiders and his desire for Intel to become a big custom chip player.

In a recent interview with CRN, veteran tech analyst Jack Gold of Northborough, Mass.-based J. Gold, said it’s not unusual for a new CEO like Tan (pictured), who started at Intel early last year, to bring in his own people to lead critical functions. But it’s nevertheless a big change for Intel, which, for many years in many cases, crowned leaders from within.

Several of Intel’s top executives now consist of outsiders who Tan has appointed. These include the leaders of Intel’s PC and data center businesses as well as the technology development arm of its contract chip manufacturing business, Intel Foundry.

“He’s trying to change the direction of where Intel is going in the following sense: Intel has been for the last several years kind of a stodgy organization. ‘We’ve always done it this way. We’ll continue to do it this way. The reason we sell stuff in PCs is because we give whoever—Lenovo or Dell or HP [Inc.]—dollars to go promote our stuff,’ and that kind of stuff worked well for them over the years, but not now,” Gold told CRN.

That new direction not only requires Intel to do well in its traditional PC and server markets but also to expand into new ones that could make the company bigger and better than before, according to the analyst. And one of those markets is custom chip design services, which is where Jarnac’s former employer, Marvell, has found traction.

The work centers around custom ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits). Hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud have increasingly embraced custom ASICs as an alternative to GPUs, namely those from Nvidia, to run AI workloads. Frontier AI labs have started to show serious interest too, with OpenAI revealing its custom inference chip called Jalapeño and Anthropic confirming in August that it has an in-house chip team.

These outfits in some cases are turning to semiconductor companies such as Marvell or Broadcom to help design their chips. For instance, Marvell announced in August that it had reached a deal with Google to design custom chips, including AI inference accelerators. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are working with Broadcom, which is lending up to $42 billion to finance the latter company’s infrastructure spending.

ASICs are far from a new thing for Intel. In fact, the company expanded into the ASIC market all the way back in the mid-’80s to diversify its business.

But the company is showing a renewed interest in becoming a major ASIC player, and it’s already seeing some fresh momentum. During the company’s July earnings call, Intel CFO David Zinsner said its ASIC business was approaching a $2 billion run rate, which he thinks could reach $4 billion “in the not-too-distant future.”

Gold, the analyst, believes Tan is likely looking to tap into Jarnac’s experience working for a company with a successful ASIC design business to propel those efforts even further, which he thinks Intel could parlay into wins for Intel Foundry.

The potential for such synergy was on display when Intel announced in July that it had landed a deal to develop and manufacture Fortinet’s next-generation security processor for high-performance firewalls and security infrastructure.

“[Marvell] designs chips, and so he knows, I’m assuming pretty well, how that whole process works when you work [for a] chip design company versus a company that designs and makes their own chips [like Intel],” he said.

In announcing Jarnac’s appointment, Intel called out ASICs as one of the key areas for which the sales leader is expected to strengthen its customer relationships and go-to-market execution. The other four areas are client, data center, AI and networking, the latter of which is also familiar business for Jarnac because of his time at Marvell and Broadcom.

It’s here where Gold also sees opportunity for Jarnac, who served in sales and channel leadership roles at both companies, to make his mark.

“Marvell does have very significant assets in networking that right now Intel doesn’t have, especially around the optical stuff,” he said.