Sailesh Kottapalli, a senior fellow at Intel, has left the company to take up a position with Qualcomm.
Announcing the move on LinkedIn, Kottapalli said that his new job was “a once-in-a-career opportunity that I could not pass on,” and would allow him to “innovate and grow while helping to scale new frontiers.”
Kottapalli had previously worked at Intel for almost 29 years, where his roles included lead engineer on many Xeon server processors and platform engineering group director for data center process architecture.
“My journey took me through roles as a validation engineer, logic designer, full-chip floor planner, post-silicon debug engineer, micro architect, and architect,” he wrote in his post. “I worked on CPU cores, memory, IO, and platform aspects of the system, spanning multiple architectures across x86 and Itanium, and products including CPU and GPU, most importantly shaping the Xeon product line.”
He added that he felt “good about where Xeon is right now and what is coming up next.”
Kottapalli’s move comes as job listings posted by Qualcomm reveal that the company is looking for a server system-on-a-chip architect to join its data center team and work on the development of a “high performance, energy efficient server solution for data center applications.”
According to the job posting, Qualcomm’s data center team is focused on “developing reference platforms based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon SoC”, and delivering a “comprehensive solution that includes hardware, software, reference designs, user guides, SDKs.”
“The ideal candidate will have extensive knowledge of SoC architecture for data center SoCs,” the listing read.
Qualcomm specializes in chips for smartphones and other mobile devices, but in recent years has reportedly been looking to expand into the server market too.
In 2022, it was reported that Qualcomm had approached cloud and data center companies about testing an Arm chip for the server market. The chip was built by Nuvia, a company Qualcomm acquired for $1.4 billion the previous year.
However, the acquisition resulted in a legal dispute, with Arm accusing Qualcomm of failing to seek the required approval to transfer licenses from Nuvia over to Qualcomm. In December 2024, a US jury found that Qualcomm had properly licensed the processor designs but a mistrial was declared regarding the accusation that the acquisition breached the terms of Qualcomm’s agreement to license Arm IP.
Prior to 2022, Qualcomm had previously tried to enter the Arm server market with the Centriq 2400, but laid off its Arm team as it recovered from a failed hostile takeover by Broadcom.