Poached egg-head
AMD has managed to poach a senior Intel engineer to become the new CTO of its server division. The fact that Donald Newell has spent the past 16 years as an engineer at Intel makes this move intriguing by itself, but when you look at his areas of interest it might also offer some insight into AMD's server plans.
As stated in the press release, and confirmed on Newell's Linked In page, Newell not only has extensive experience as an engineer in the datacentre networking architecture group at Intel, he also has extensive experience in designing SoCs (system-on-chips) too.
This immediately made us think of the potential new threat to Intel in the server space from Smooth Stone - a start-up specialising in SoCs for servers funded by, among others, ARM and ATIC. No sooner does ARM make its server move than AMD grabs an Intel senior engineer who specialises SoCs to determine the future direction on its server offering.
"Don Newell brings a strong combination of leadership skills, engineering and design expertise, and strategic direction," said AMD product boss Rick Bergman. "We're fortunate to have Don on board as we prepare for the delivery of the 'Bulldozer' core in our AMD Opteron processors, scheduled for launch in 2011."
AMD was quite keen to show off all the clever things Newell has been responsible for at Intel. As well as all this SoC and networking geekery, He was involved with I/O acceleration technologies, heterogeneous computing architecture and digital TV receivers for PCs.
With the cloud computing era still in its infancy, the datacentre market will continue to grow exponentially. With that comes an ever greater need to manage the power and cooling needs of the massive sever farms that run them. This means there is massive potential for low-power processors in datacentres and, with this addition to its senior team, AMD has made a clear statement of intent.
