The executive in charge of almost all of Intel's hardware, Chief Technical Officer Dr. Venkata (Murthy) Renduchintala, is leaving the company on 3 August, Intel reported on Monday.
His exit arrives in the wake of Intel's announcement that his next-gen 7 nm chips are being postponed until at least 2022, and after years of delays for the company's 10 nm processors, which have nested developments for most of the laptop industry. Intel did not cite a specific reason for Renduchintal 's departure.
Intel poached Renduchintala from Qualcomm in February 2016, and placed him in charge of everything from design to engineering, to the development of Intel chips — and other hardware bets — on one side, the Technology, Systems Architecture and the Company Community. The company will now be split into five separate teams, sharing responsibility for product development, production, design engineering , architecture and supply chain management, and the members of each of these divisions will report directly to Intel CEO Bob Swan.
On Thursday, Swan spent part of the company's earnings call addressing the likelihood of Intel abandoning the tradition of manufacturing its own chips, something that had been done for a long time, even though rivals like AMD outsourced actual chip development. Intel is rumored to be in talks with TSMC, where it may have to compete with Apple, Qualcomm, AMD and Nvidia for the attention of the Taiwanese semiconductor giant, among other customers.
