Pat Gelsinger And 3 Other Big New Hires By Intel

Intel’s incoming CEO is returning to the semiconductor giant with other company veterans and an associate who previously worked for him at VMware.

Gelsinger’s Associates Are Coming On Board

It hasn’t even been a month since Intel appointed Pat Gelsinger (pictured) as its new CEO, and three industry veterans who have worked with Gelsinger in the past are already following him to the chipmaker.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company announced on Jan. 13 that Gelsinger, who is currently VMware’s CEO, will return to the semiconductor giant as its new leader following an 11-year absence from Intel, where Gelsinger worked for the first 30 years of his career.

In the chipmaker’s earnings call last month, Gelsinger made his first public comments as Intel’s incoming CEO and promised that former employees will be returning with him to help tackle the company’s manufacturing issues and fight against growing competition from AMD and elsewhere.

“You’ll be seeing we’re making adjustments in the leadership of our product development teams as well, where talent is going to come into the company,” he said.

Glenn Hinton is now one of three people with ties to Gelsinger who have been hired by Intel since the CEO shakeup was announced. The other two people were announced last week: Sunil Shenoy and Guido Appenzeller. What follows are the most important details you need to know about Hinton, Shenoy and Appenzeller.

Glenn Hinton

Hinton announced on Jan. 21 that he was returning to the company to work on a “high-performance CPU project” following a three-year retirement.

In a LinkedIn post, Hinton made it clear that Gelsinger becoming Intel’s CEO played a factor.

“Having Pat Gelsinger coming back as CEO also helped me finalize my decision to come back,” he said.

Gelsinger said during Intel’s earnings call last month that Hinton “was one of my absolute favorites” during his previous 30-year tenure at the company.

Hinton was a senior fellow at Intel when he retired from the company in 2017, and he had played a major role in many products across his 34-year career there. They included the i960 microprocessor in the 1980s, the P6 microarchitecture in the 1990s and the Nehalem microarchitecture in the 2000s.

According to a biography on Stanford University’s website, Hinton held more than 90 patents from eight different CPU designs as of 2010. His work as the senior architect of the P6 processor design led to the Pentium Pro, Pentium II and Pentium III, and served as the basis for the Core microarchitecture.

Sunil Shenoy

Intel announced on Jan. 27 that Shenoy will rejoin the company as senior vice president and general manager of the Design Engineering Group.

In his role, which began Monday, Shenoy will be responsible for the “design, development, validation and manufacturing of intellectual properties and system-on-chips for client and data center applications,” according to Intel.

Bob Swan, Intel’s outgoing CEO, welcomed the “fresh perspective” Shenoy will bring to Intel.

“Sunil is a proven engineering leader who has deep experience in microprocessor and SoC design and R&D,” he said in a statement. “His experience inside and outside of Intel will enable him to combine the best of Intel culture with an entrepreneurial spirit and fresh perspective as we work to strengthen the company’s technical leadership team and to coach and develop a new generation of technical talent.”

Having worked at Intel for 33 years, Shenoy’s previous job at the company was co-general manager and corporate vice president of Intel’s Platform Engineering Group, which focused on microprocessor and SoC design and development. Prior to that, he was the co-general manager of the Visual and Parallel Computing Group, which focused on graphics and Intel’s now-defunct Xeon Phi processors.

Shenoy was most recently senior vice president and general manager of RISC-V at SiFive, a fabless semiconductor company working on CPU designs using the open-source RISC-V architecture. Intel Capital, the chipmaker’s venture arm, is an investor in SiFive.

Guido Appenzeller

Appenzeller announced on Jan. 27 that he is joining Intel as CTO of the company’s Data Platforms Group, whose portfolio includes Xeon CPUs, Optane memory and FPGAs, among other things.

Unlike Hinton and Shenoy, Appenzeller did not previously work at Intel. However, he had previously worked for Gelsinger at VMware as CTO of cloud and networking from 2014 to 2019.

“Intel has a long and storied history. However, as it has been widely publicized, it today faces a range of challenges,” Appenzeller said in his LinkedIn post. “At the same time, Intel still has enormous strength in their data center CPUs, massive scale, a deep and diverse portfolio and a great team at the DPG. In the end, my decision was based on the belief that the opportunities outweigh the challenges. And judging by the recent move by Pat Gelsinger, I am not the only one with that view.”

Appenzeller was most recently chief product officer at Yubico, a company that provides a hardware authentication device known as the YubiKey. Before his time at VMware, Appenzeller was CEO and co-founder of Big Switch Networks, a software-defined networking vendor that was acquired by data center and large campus networking specialist Arista Networks last year.