(Bloomberg) — Intel Corp.’s incoming Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger is luring back talent to world’s largest chipmaker before he even officially returns.
Sunil Shenoy will rejoin Intel as senior vice president of the Design Engineering group effective Feb. 1, the Santa Clara, California-based company said in a statement Wednesday. When he left in 2014, Shenoy was head of Intel’s platform engineering group, a narrower role to the one he’s assuming now.
Glenn Hinton, a former Intel Senior Fellow who led the development of a key chip design, also returned to the company recently in a senior engineering role. Shenoy and Hinton will report to outgoing CEO Bob Swan until the middle of February, and then to Gelsinger who officially rejoins Intel on Feb. 15.
Gelsinger, who previously spent 30 years at Intel, said he’s bringing back the style of management he learned from the founders, notably Andy Grove. Before Swan, Intel had always been run by home-grown executives who were adherents to Grove’s data-driven decision making and direct, sometimes confrontational, internal communication aimed at ensuring problems were never buried.
In Gelsinger’s absence, Intel lost its lead in manufacturing technology, leaving it facing rivals with better products and customers that are defecting or building their own chips. Under Swan’s predecessor, Brian Krzanich, a number of senior executives and top engineers left and were replaced by outsiders. The influx of executives, such as Murthy Renduchintala from Qualcomm Inc., failed to fix product delays and contributed to a crisis that spurred the board to recruit Gelsinger.
Shenoy was an executive at SiFive, a startup that’s trying to commercialize chip designs based on a technology called RISC-V, a rival to Intel’s X86 and Arm Ltd.’s dominant instruction sets.
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“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,” Swan said in the statement.
