Sailesh Kottapalli, a 28-year veteran at Intel who most recently served as senior fellow and chief architect of Xeon server CPUs, has joined Qualcomm to build a team to help the chip designer enter the data center CPU market. He said he joined the company.
The chief architect of Intel’s Xeon server processors said he has joined Qualcomm as the rival chip designer builds a team to enter the data center CPU market.
Sailesh Kottapalli, who worked at Intel for 28 years and most recently served as senior fellow and chief architect of the company’s Xeon processors, joined Qualcomm as senior vice president this month after leaving Intel, he said on LinkedIn on Monday. Ta.
(Related: CES 2025: Intel, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm unveil 15 PC chips)
“The opportunity to innovate and grow while helping expand to new frontiers was very appealing to me,” Kottapalli (pictured) wrote on LinkedIn. “This was a once-in-a-career opportunity that I couldn’t pass up. ” he wrote on LinkedIn.
Kottapalli, who served as lead engineer on several Itanium and Xeon chips at Intel before becoming the company’s chief It’s a highly efficient server solution.
The chip designer made the announcement in a December job listing for a server system-on-chip (SoC) security architect. The data center team is focused on building a “reference platform” based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon system-on-chip, according to the listing.
The server SoC security architect will lead the development of “system architectures for sensitive computing in data center products,” according to the listing. Confidential Computing has become a standard feature of Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC CPUs over the past few years.
Qualcomm did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
This isn’t Qualcomm’s only effort to sell products in the data center market. The company has been selling AI accelerator chips under the Qualcomm Cloud AI brand for the past few years. These chips are supported by major IT companies such as Amazon Web Services, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Lenovo.
Qualcomm’s revitalized CPU push starts with PCs
Last year, San Diego, Calif.-based Qualcomm, best known for its Arm-based Snapdragon processors for smartphones, launched a new effort to compete with Intel and AMD in the PC CPU market with its Snapdragon X-series chips.
As reported by CRN, the company is building a global partner program and organization to enable and incentivize channel partners to sell Snapdragon X-based PCs.
The Snapdragon There is.
When Qualcomm announced its acquisition of Nuvia, the company said it would use the CPU cores for several product areas, including laptops, smartphones, digital cockpits, advanced driver assistance systems, augmented reality, and infrastructure networking solutions.
However, the company acknowledged in a legal filing last year that Nuvia plans to continue developing CPUs for the data center market, as originally intended.
The lawsuit is a complaint against Arm, a British chip design licensor, alleging that it violated the terms of its license by continuing to develop Nuvia’s CPU cores under Qualcomm after the acquisition was completed. I appealed.
The case ended in a mistrial in late December after a U.S. federal jury sided with Qualcomm on two key issues but deadlocked on a third. Arm, which had sought an injunction and destruction of products based on Nuvia CPU cores, plans to seek a retrial.
Qualcomm tried to enter the server CPU market a few years ago, but withdrew from that effort in 2018, resulting in layoffs.
The Qualcomm job posting was first reported by Tom’s Hardware.
