With Ronak Singhal's impending departure, he will become Intel's second Xeon chief architect to lose in about eight months, and comes as Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan is pushing for changes to revitalize its data center business, including appointing a new leader for the business.

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan is pushing for changes to revitalize its data center business, and the company will lose its second chief architect for Xeon CPUs this year, CRN has learned.

Colleagues recently learned that Ronak Singhal, Intel Senior Fellow and chief architect for Xeon products, will leave the semiconductor giant at the end of this month, according to people familiar with the matter. They asked not to be identified discussing the matter because they were not authorized to discuss the details.

With Singhal's impending departure, he will be Intel's second chief Xeon architect to leave in about eight months. Sailesh Kottapalli, also an Intel Senior Fellow, left the company in January to help lead Qualcomm's server CPU revitalization efforts.

After this article was published, Intel confirmed Singhal's departure to CRN but declined further comment. Singhal also declined to comment.

A former Intel colleague called Singhal an "industry giant" who "has done more to advance the x86 architecture than anyone I can think of." "Customers have a lot of respect for him, and I think they see this as another loss of someone who understands their needs," the unnamed colleague said candidly about his former employer.

Most recently, Singal led the company's overall roadmap, technology strategy, and product management for the Xeon server CPU. In a February interview with CRN, Singal stated that product management was a recently assigned responsibility.

According to his LinkedIn page, his responsibilities encompass not only products but also platforms and various related technologies, such as Xeon memory, security, and AI.

Previously, Singal led server architecture development for the "Haswell" and "Broadwell" CPUs, Intel's first 14nm server chip, according to his LinkedIn page. He also led the development of "CPU core intellectual property" for Intel's Xeon, Core, and Atom processors.

Earlier in his career at Intel, Singal led "overall performance efforts" for the "Nehalem" and "Westmere" CPU architectures. Before that, he focused on performance analysis and verification of Intel's Pentium 4 processors.

The New head

Lip-Bu Tan appoints new head of Data Center Group, striving for change

Singhal's departure comes as Lip-Mou Tan appoints a new leader for the Data Center Group, the company's chief architect business unit, as it pushes for changes to revive its server CPU business. These changes are part of a larger restructuring that Tan has undertaken over the past few months, including a 15% workforce reduction to accelerate Intel's organizational pace.

Intel announced on Monday that Kevork Kechichian, a two-year Arm executive, has been appointed as the new executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group. Tan reorganized the business unit earlier this year, shifting responsibility for Intel's accelerator chip business to a new unit led by executive Sachin Katti, focusing primarily on CPUs.

Since becoming Intel's CEO in March, Intel's server CPU business has been one of Tan's top priorities, facing increasing competition from AMD as well as companies like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Nvidia, which are developing Arm-based CPUs for cloud and AI infrastructure. In his first public remarks as Intel CEO in late March, Lip-Mo Tan said the company needed to "strengthen" its data center offerings and acknowledged the need to "recruit some of the best talent in the industry back" as part of his push for the chipmaker to become an "engineering-centric company."

Sinsner called the successor to Diamond Rapids, code-named Coral Rapids, a "real opportunity" for Intel to "really take a big step forward."

Source: Content compiled from CRN

Reference link: https://www.crn.com/news/components-peripherals/2025/Intel-is-losing-its-second-Xeon-chief-architect-in-eight-months

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