Sailesh Kottapalli, an Intel veteran who worked as chief engineer on many Xeon server processors, is leaving the company and switching to Qualcomm.
This reports the Register. Kottapalli announced his career move via a LinkedIn post on Monday. According to him, the new job allows him to innovate and grow. At the same time, he can help his new employer explore new frontiers. It was an opportunity Kottapalli said he could not pass up. Qualcomm has been coveting the server silicon market for years. This is a high-margin sector with established players.
Long career
Kottapalli has the necessary skills to support the company in this endeavor. According to his Intel biography, he was Platform Engineering Group Director for Datacenter Processor Architecture. The biography also describes a long career that began with work on the first Itanium processor. He eventually advanced to chief engineer for more chips in that product line before becoming chief architect for a range of Intel Xeon server processors.
Work in this area even earned Kottapalli an Intel Achievement Award for achieving record-breaking one-generation performance in a high-end server product.
Good performance Snapdragon
Kottapalli’s parting message does not specify what he will work on at Qualcomm, but the company has plenty of reasons to pursue the server market. Indeed, their Snapdragon Elite PC chips performed so well that Microsoft was the only silicon to qualify them for the Copilot+ PC badge, used by Redmond to designate the fastest and most intelligent Windows PCs.
Suppose Qualcomm can repeat that success with server silicon. In that case, it is a serious contender for the huge global fleet of enterprise servers running on x86 silicon, plus the millions of such systems available in the cloud.
Lower energy consumption
The huge workloads of hyperscalers to support their operations represent another considerable market, in which operators are always willing to embrace technology that lowers operating costs. Hypothetical Arm-powered Qualcomm server chips would potentially use less energy than x86 competitors.
Or perhaps Kottapalli will help Qualcomm work on AI accelerators, a booming sector. In his LinkedIn message, the brand-new Qualcomm senior VP mentions that he already has experience with GPUs.
Whatever Qualcomm plans to do with Kottapalli, this is an important moment, if only because Kottapalli sees his unique opportunity at Qualcomm – and not at increasingly pressured Intel.