Track Hpyer | Qualcomm secures Intel Xeon CPU chief architect

Author: Zhou Yuan / Wall Street News

As the saying goes: "Take advantage of your illness to take your life." Intel is in deep trouble, and Qualcomm, the "new star" in PC chips, is seizing the opportunity to poach Intel's server CPU architect in hopes of entering the data center CPU market while simultaneously weakening Intel's server CPU competitiveness.

On January 13, Sailesh Kottapalli, the former chief architect of Intel's Xeon server processors, wrote on LinkedIn: "While helping to expand into new areas, the opportunity for innovation and growth is extremely attractive to me. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in my career that I cannot miss."

Who is he helping to expand into new areas?

Qualcomm.

According to Kottapalli, he has left Intel and joined Qualcomm in January as a Senior Vice President.

Kottapalli worked at Intel for 28 years.

In 1996, Kottapalli participated in the research and development of Intel's first-generation Itanium® processor "Merced" as a design engineer. Subsequently, Kottapalli served as the chief engineer for multiple Itanium and Xeon processors, responsible for evaluating and optimizing these processors.

During his time at Intel, Kottapalli's work spanned various architectures, including x86 and Itanium, involving products such as CPUs and GPUs; he has conducted in-depth research and practice in multiple areas, including CPU, memory, I/O, and system platforms.

In recent years, Kottapalli, as chief architect, has been responsible for the research and development of multiple generations of Xeon processors, continuously improving and innovating the Xeon processor architecture, significantly enhancing performance, energy efficiency, and reliability.

Due to the excellent performance of the Xeon processors, Kottapalli received the Intel Achievement Award for achieving record intergenerational performance improvements in high-end server products, ensuring Intel's leading position in the data center CPU market.

Kottapalli holds over 30 patents in the field of CPU processor architecture, with more patents currently pending.

How did Qualcomm become interested in the server CPU market? In fact, Qualcomm has made attempts in this market for some time.

In 2016, Qualcomm launched the Centriq series of server CPUs. However, at that time, the Arm architecture server CPU ecosystem was relatively weak, and Qualcomm was also mired in patent litigation and hostile takeovers, leading to the forced abandonment of its server business in 2018.

A turning point occurred in 2020.

That year, Qualcomm acquired Nuvia (a high-performance CPU design company founded in Santa Clara, California, in 2019), successfully launching the Snapdragon X series AI PC chips with its self-developed CPU cores, enhancing Qualcomm's technical accumulation and market experience in the server processor field.

At the same time, the market share of Arm architecture-based servers had exceeded 10%, and the richness of the ecosystem had significantly improved compared to 2016 It is worth mentioning Nuvia.

Founded in February 2019 by architects Gerard Williams III, Manu Gulati, and John Bruno, who had previously worked on iPhone chip development at Apple.

Among them, Gerard Williams was Apple's former chief architect and led the design of several A-series processors.

In November of the same year, Nuvia completed a $53 million Series A financing; in September 2020, the company completed another round of financing of $240 million.

Qualcomm may have set its sights on Nuvia around that time. On January 13, 2021, Qualcomm announced it would acquire Nuvia for $1.4 billion, aiming to enhance Qualcomm's CPU design capabilities and achieve breakthroughs in the high-performance computing market.

It can be said that this deal was very worthwhile for Qualcomm.

Before being acquired by Qualcomm, Nuvia was working on a leading CPU core codenamed "Phoenix." After the acquisition, Nuvia's Phoenix technology was integrated into the Snapdragon series chips, such as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, which features Qualcomm's self-developed second-generation Oryon CPU.

How did the Oryon CPU come about?

Nuvia's originally self-developed Phoenix CPU core was further developed and optimized by Qualcomm, ultimately evolving into the Oryon CPU.

This transformation allowed Qualcomm to leverage Nuvia's technological advantages to achieve breakthroughs in CPU performance, especially in high-performance computing, providing strong technical support for Qualcomm's product competitiveness in mobile chips and potentially other fields (such as data centers) in the future.

It is evident how difficult technological breakthroughs are; even a strong company like Qualcomm needs to integrate top industry technology teams to achieve the goal of generational technological advancement.

Qualcomm's server CPU uses Nuvia cores based on the Arm architecture, aiming to become a strong competitor in the x86 architecture-dominated server market.

Qualcomm has developed a server CPU codenamed "SD1," which uses TSMC's 5nm process technology and incorporates multiple Oryon cores developed by Qualcomm's subsidiary Nuvia, supporting high-speed DDR5 memory and multiple PCIe interfaces.

The development of this product is an important step in Qualcomm's strategy to enter the data center CPU market.

Currently, the data center market is mainly dominated by Intel and AMD, forming a relatively stable competitive landscape. Qualcomm needs to find its positioning and breakthrough point in this market to compete with these giants.

Although the Arm architecture server market share is increasing and the ecosystem is becoming more complete, the x86 architecture-dominated server market has formed a mature ecosystem. Qualcomm needs to find its foothold in this ecosystem and establish a matching ecosystem.

To this end, Qualcomm is building a global partner program and organizational structure to incentivize channel partners to sell devices based on its products and collaborate with industry leaders such as Amazon Web Services and HPE to gradually occupy this high-margin market From this perspective, Qualcomm's ambition to compete in the server CPU market and poach Intel's Kottapalli is likely just the beginning