Intel hires Dr. Murthy Renduchintala, former co-president of Qualcomm's main chip unit, to head new group that includes many units including PC and mobile chips
Eugene Kim / Business Insider :
Context & Ripple Effects
In late 2015 Intel reached into Qualcomm and hired Murthy Renduchintala, co-president of its main chip unit, to run a newly formed group that folds PC and mobile chips under one roof — a bet that client silicon across form factors should be led by a single executive trained inside Qualcomm's handset business. He rose to be Intel's second-in-command, talking publicly about drones, cars, and winding down Atom-based mobile chips.
The hire opened a pipeline that kept flowing: Intel took Qualcomm CFO George Davis as its own CFO in 2019, and in 2026 an ex-Qualcomm EVP, Alex Katouzian, took over Client Computing after CEO Lip-Bu Tan flattened the leadership team. Renduchintala himself did not last — he exited in the 2020 reorg that handed 7nm and 5nm development to Ann Kelleher.
First-order effects
- Intel consolidates its PC and mobile chip units into one group under Renduchintala, ending their separate management lines.
- Qualcomm loses a co-president of its flagship chip business to a direct competitor in client computing.
Second-order effects
- The Qualcomm-to-Intel talent route hardens into a pattern — Davis follows in finance, Katouzian in client computing a decade later — making Qualcomm a recurring feeder of senior Intel leadership.
- Device makers and rivals read the merged PC-plus-mobile group as Intel building a single silicon roadmap across laptops, tablets, and phones rather than running them as separate product fiefs.
Third-order effects
- The structure itself proves unstable: Renduchintala departs in the 2020 reorg, Tan flattens semiconductor groups under direct CEO control in 2025, and Katouzian inherits a rebuilt Client Computing group in 2026 — pointing toward recurring organizational resets of Intel's client-chip leadership instead of any durable design.
- If the hiring pattern holds, Intel's client-computing identity stays tethered to people formed inside Qualcomm's mobile-centric playbook, shaping how the company weighs phone-derived silicon against its PC heritage.
The trend: Intel's client-computing organization has been periodically rebuilt around executives recruited from Qualcomm, with each reorg redrawing the boundary between PC and mobile silicon.