Intel Names Greg Ernst CRO, Hires Three Engineering Leaders

The semiconductor giant names 25-year sales veteran Greg Ernst chief revenue officer and the head of its Sales and Marketing Group while hiring three engineering veterans who previously worked at Apple, Google and Cadence Design Systems to lead AI and custom chip efforts.

Intel said Wednesday that it has named 25-year sales veteran Greg Ernst chief revenue officer and hired three outsider engineering veterans to lead custom and AI chip efforts.

As chief revenue officer, Ernst will continue to lead Intel’s Sales and Marketing Group, a responsibility he has held since last month following the resignation of Chief Commercial Officer Christoph Schell, who is expected to leave this month.

To boost efforts designing custom chips for customers, the semiconductor giant hired Srinivasan Iyengar, a silicon engineering leader at Cadence Design Systems, to lead a new customer engineering center of excellence as senior vice president and fellow.

Iyengar and Ernst (pictured above) will report directly to Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan as part of his executive team.

To support its AI strategy, the company hired Jean-Didier Allegrucci, a longtime chip designer who spent 17 years at Apple, as vice president of AI system-on-chip (SoC) engineering; and Shailendra Desai, who led silicon engineering, architecture design and platform solutions for multiple mobile SoC designs at Google, as vice president of AI fabric and networking.

Allegrucci—referred by his first initials “J-D”—and Desai will report to Sachin Katti, who was appointed in April to lead Intel’s AI strategy as chief AI and technology officer.

“We see significant opportunities ahead to strengthen our product offerings and meet the changing needs of our customers,” Tan said in a statement.

“Greg, Srini, J-D and Shailendra are highly accomplished leaders with strong reputations across our ecosystem, and they will each play important roles as we position our business for the future,” he added.

The executive moves were announced as Tan, who became Intel’s CEO in March, pushes for tectonic shifts within the beleaguered chipmaker, including a new round of mass layoffs that will reportedly target up to 20 percent of factory workers and an unknown number of employees in other divisions.

These job cuts are expected to happen as part of what Intel has called a move by Tan to streamline the organization, eliminate management layers and enable faster decision-making in his bid to turn around the company.

An Intel spokesperson told CRN on Tuesday that the company is “taking steps to become a leaner, faster and more efficient company,” as it had previously announced.

Ernst Takes Over SMG After Leading Americas Sales

In a Wednesday post on LinkedIn, Ernst said he is taking over the Sales and Marketing Group (SMG) at a “pivotal time” for the company, which will put an emphasis on engaging with customers and partners on an engineering level.

“The foundation of our engagement with customers will be an engineering-to-engineering engagement that fosters innovation for our partners,” he wrote, adding that “executing with partners and customers” will be a top priority.

“There is progress to make, trust to build, and we’re all-in to help our customers and partners win with Intel,” Ernst said near the end of his post.

Before Ernst became interim chief commercial officer to lead SMG in May, he had served as corporate vice president and general manager of Americas sales, which includes the company’s sales efforts with channel partners.

When Tan appointed Ernst as interim chief commercial officer in April, the CEO called him a “people-first, customer-centric executive with nearly 20 years of Intel sales experience” in a memo to employees seen by CRN. At the time, Tan said Intel was evaluating for “best long-term succession plan” for SMG.

“He and I have been spending time together as we do deep dives on key accounts, and I look forward to working more closely with him going forward,” Tan wrote in the memo.

SMG’s previous leader, Schell, was appointed chief commercial officer by former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger in 2022. Schell announced in late April that he was resigning to become CEO of German automation company Kuka.

During his tenure, Schell, a former HP Inc. executive, oversaw major changes to SMG, including a significant reduction in costs and headcount that were carried out as part of Gelsinger’s move last year to slash Intel’s workforce by more than 15 percent and reduce spending by over $10 billion in response to deteriorating financial conditions.

When Intel announced the job cuts last August, the company told SMG employees that it would cut the division’s costs by more than 35 percent, CRN reported at the time.

These cuts hit Intel’s global partner organization, which reduced direct partner coverage and reworked its market development funds while it increased overall partner funding, Intel Global Channel Chief Dave Guzzi told CRN in January.

In an interview with CRN last fall, Ernst said the company had a “really wide bench of incredible people” to fill regional channel roles as part of a new engagement model that would promise more consistency for partners.

“They need a predictable support model, and that’s what this structure gets,” he said at the time.

Intel Hires From Rain AI, Google And Cadence For New Leaders

Prior to Intel appointing him to lead the company’s custom chip design efforts, Iyengar had worked since at least 1997 for Cadence, a major supplier of chip design software that Tan led as CEO from 2009 to 2021, according to his LinkedIn profile.

The chipmaker said that Iyengar, who most recently held the title of corporate vice president at Cadence, has “extensive experience and expertise in helping customers create best-in-class custom silicon, including a deep focus on hyperscale data center solutions optimized for key workloads.”

Intel has been ramping up its efforts to design custom chips over the last several months as hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud increasingly lean on homegrown chip designs to meet their unique needs.

Before Gelsinger was reportedly forced to quit by Intel’s board last December, the now-former CEO had announced a few months prior a “multi-year, multibillion-dollar framework” where it will design and manufacture custom chips for Amazon Web Services.

That vision continues under Tan, who said at the Intel Vision event in late March that he believes the company can “play an important role in developing custom silicon that tailor for specific applications.”

Allegrucci, Intel’s new head of AI SoC engineering, “will be responsible for managing the development of multiple SoCs that will be part of Intel’s AI road map,” according to the company.

He most recently led AI silicon engineering as vice president of engineering at Rain AI, a chip startup backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

Prior to joining Rain AI, Allegrucci spent 17 years, including most recently as a senior director, at Apple, “where he oversaw the development of more than 30 [system-on-chips] used across many of the company’s flagship products,” according to Intel.

Desai, Intel’s new head of AI fabric and networking, will lead “development of innovative SoC architectures for Intel’s AI GPUs and forward-looking road map,” according to the company.

He had joined Google in 2021 through its acquisition of Provino Technologies, a chip startup he led and founded that was focused on developing an interconnect platform.

Prior to starting Provino in 2015, Desai served as a senior engineering manager for five years at Apple and in the same role before that at chip design firm PA Semi, which Apple acquired in 2008 and has served a major role in that company’s homegrown chip efforts.

Intel officials have previously said the company still intends to develop a rack-scale AI solution based on a next-generation chip called “Jaguar Shores.”