Switching sides
We can reveal that former communications VP at GlobalFoundries (GF) - Jon Carvill - has left the company after being recruited by chip giant Intel to work primarily on the battle with ARM in the mobile chip space.
Carvill was a senior PR exec at AMD before opting to follow many of his colleagues when the company sold its semiconductor foundries to ATIC, which led to the formation of GF. While AMD remained GF's biggest customer, most of the business development efforts were focused on the SoC space as the true extent of the mobile device boom became apparent.
So while we would expect AMD to be a tad unsettled by the thought of its former employee now playing for the blue team, it's ARM that should really sit up and pay attention.
We don't know Carvill's exact job title yet, but it will be a global role with a focus on the low power processor war. He has a history of having to punch above his weight while representing the underdog: at AMD vs. Intel and NVIDIA, and at GF vs TSMC. Ironically, now that Carvill has finally joined a dominant player, he'll still be representing the plucky upstart.
Because that's exactly what Intel is in the mobile space. It received some decent PR on the back of its recent 22nm launch but, to be frank, there remain few commentators who consider Intel to be much of a player in the mobile market right now.
The main reason for this is the scarcity of mobile devices containing Intel chips, and there's only so much a spinner can do if there are no products on the market. But Carvill has historically been very aggressive about extracting the maximum from every opportunity, so you can expect him and Intel to be posing ARM some new challenges as soon as they do have something to crow about.
When and what that will be, however, remains to be seen.
