The appointment of Pat Gelsinger as CEO of Intel , even if the change of official deliveries with Bob Swan will take place on 15 February, appears to have brought a wave of enthusiasm around the microchip giant. Glenn Hinton , principal architectural designer Nehalem and before that several other designs including the P6, announced that will return to work for Intel at three years since his retirement.

“After enjoying my retirement for three years,” Hinton explained on LinkedIn, “I decided to go back to work at Intel (where I previously worked for 35 years) What drives me to do such a thing? I will be working on the exciting project of a high-performance CPU. The return of Pat Gelsinger as CEO also helped me take the decision to return “.

Pat Gelsinger, then Senior Vice President by Intel, during the announcement of the Nehalem CPUs in November 2018 in San Francisco

Nehalem is a high-end architecture tions dating back to 21 years ago (maybe someone will remember the Core i7- 965 Extreme Edition a 45 nanometers) and which for Intel represented a further progress compared to the Core project which brought it back to the top in 2006, after complicated years (who said Prescott?) in the eternal struggle with AMD. The focus, however, is not so much on what has been as on what will be.

In his post Hinton says two fundamental things : the first is that Intel is working on an “exciting” high performance CPU. We still don’t know what it is, but Intel needs a similar project if it wants to face a very competitive AMD in all sectors and slow down the climb of ARM solutions both in the consumer sector (and here Apple will play a fundamental role) and in the server one.

The second is that Pat Gelsinger , a CEO with a technical background behind him (as indeed Lisa Su from AMD) can act as magnet for old and new talents able to realize better processors. Knowing that there is someone at the top who fully understands the problems that a designer encounters every day and who puts the product at the center must be reassuring. Swan is a CFO serving as CEO, and in fact Intel’s revenue has flown.

Intel last year saw several upheavals among their ranks , with a rearrangement of the divisions responsible for the development of new architectures and the lightning exit of Murthy Renduchintala, then boss of the Technology, Systems Architecture and Client Group (TSCG). We should also not forget the farewell of Jim Keller (officially for personal reasons …), recently aboard the Tenstorrent startup. Obviously Gelsinger, fresh from a great adventure in VMware, will have to be put to the test of facts to be judged.