At the far opposite end of Intel's silicon spectrum, Anand Chandrasekher, head of Intel's Ultra Mobility Group left the company "to pursue other interests."
Intel's UMG is tasked with – but so far not terribly successful at -- catching up to ARM, which has a commanding lead in the market for the low-power, high-mobility chips that are popular in the tablet market, and Nvidia, which is also making inroads.
"Pursuing other interests" normally means having to make unexpected visits to the unemployment office and outplacement counselors.
It can also mean someone important quit when the employer wasn't ready to deal with it, however.
In this case, according to processor-market analyst Nathan Brookwood at Insight 64, Chandrasekher may have left due to his own career concerns, among them the difficulty of reducing ARM's lead quickly enough to satisfy Intel bosses.
In an email to employees obtained and published by the WSJ, Chandresekher wrote that “I have done what I wanted at Intel and I felt it was time to explore other opportunities.”
Among his other accomplishments, Chandrasekher led development of Intel's low-power Atom smartphone/netbook chip and the wildly successful Centrino chipsets that made WiFi a standard option in laptops.
Kevin Fogarty writes about enterprise IT for ITworld. Follow him on Twitter @KevinFogarty.
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