Intels Datacenter Architecture Boss And Xeon Lead Jumps To Qualcomm

Intel fellow Sailesh Kottapalli, a 28-year Chipzilla veteran who worked as lead engineer on many of Xeon server processors, has left the company and joined Qualcomm.

Kottapalli announced his job change with a Monday LinkedIn post in which he wrote his new gig represents an “opportunity to innovate and grow while helping to scale new frontiers” and “a once-in-a-career opportunity that I could not pass on.”

Qualcomm has for years eyed off the market for server silicon, a field in which margins are fat and incumbencies are sticky.

Kottapalli arguably has the skills to help the company deliver, as his Intel biography details his role as Platform Engineering Group Director for Data Center Processor Architecture. It also records a long career that opened with work on the first Itanium processor and eventually saw him rise to lead engineer for more chips in that odd family before becoming “lead architect for a series of Intel Xeon server processors.”

“His work in this area earned Kottapalli an Intel Achievement Award for delivering record generational performance improvements in a high-end server product,” the bio states.

Kottapalli’s farewell post doesn’t detail what he’ll work on at Qualcomm, but the company has plenty of reasons to chase the server market after its Snapdragon Elite range of PC chips outperformed Intel silicon so comprehensively that Microsoft made them the only silicon that qualified for its Copilot+ PC badge that Redmond uses to denote “the fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs”.

• Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon X chip targets $600 Copilot+ PCs
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• Just how deep is Nvidia's CUDA moat really?
• Qualcomm's Windows on Arm push would be great – if only it ran all your software

If Qualcomm can repeat that success with server silicon, it stands to become a contender for the massive global fleet of enterprise servers running x86 silicon, plus the millions of such boxes for rent in clouds.

The massive workloads run by hyperscalers to conduct their own affairs are another giant market, and one in which operators are always willing to adopt tech that lowers their operating costs. Hypothetical Arm-powered Qualcomm server chips could require less energy than x86 rivals.

Or perhaps Kottapalli will help Qualcomm to work on AI accelerators, a booming field. In his LinkedIn post, the newly minted Qualcomm senior VP notes he’s already worked on GPUs.

Whatever Qualcomm hired him to do, this is quite a moment if only because Kottapalli sees he has a unique opportunity at the firm – and not at the increasingly beleaguered Intel. ®