Intel's Skylake Visionary Returns to Lead Client Chip Development
Intel announced that it is bringing back another one of its famed chip architects, 28-year veteran Shlomit Weiss, as CEO Pat Gelsinger continues to rebuild its engineering roster. Weiss will lead all of Intel's consumer chip development and design and appears to replace Uri Frank, who recently departed to lead Google's SoC team. Weiss returns to Intel after a four-year stint as Mellanox/Nvidia's Sr. VP of Silicon Engineering, where she ran the company's networking chip design group, a team of more than 1,000. Still, her achievements during her prior service at Intel are just as impressive.
During her previous tenure at Intel, Weiss received Intel's Achievement Award, the company's highest award, for her work developing the company's dual-core architecture. She was then entrusted with leading the team that developed Intel's famed Sandy Bridge and Skylake processors. Intel's Skylake is perhaps one of the company's most famous chip architectures simply because the company shipped multiple iterations of the same design for six long years as it dealt with the fallout of its 10nm delays. Perhaps a testament to the potency of the design, Skylake played a big role in helping Intel survive an incredibly long delay between process nodes — the architecture spanned from Intel's sixth-gen to tenth-gen Core processors and multiple generations of server chips. Intel has ceded roughly 10% of its overall market share to AMD (~8% for server, ~10% for desktop/laptop) during that time frame, but that's surprisingly limited damage given the severity of the company's delays.
Weiss rejoins Intel as the Senior VP and Co-General Manager of the company's Design Engineering Group (DEG) and will be responsible for all of the company's client chip development and design processes. It appears that Weiss will assume the same role previously held by Uri Frank, who recently left Intel to lead Google's SoC development. Weiss will work with Sunil Shenoy, another long-term Intel veteran that recently rejoined the company. Shenoy will co-manage the Design Engineering Group with Weiss in Isreal. We aren't clear on the division of responsibilities yet (he will likely lead the data center design initiatives), but we're following up with Intel for more details. Both will also work with famed chip architect Glenn Hinton, who also recently returned to Intel.
