Intel’s next CEO Pat Gelsinger recently confirmed that one of his most important goals at the helm of the chip giant will be design better CPUs, a statement with which the executive pointed directly at Apple, and specifically to its Apple M1 SoC, a chip with which the company from the bitten apple has set an important precedent that calls into question the dominance of x86 architecture.
To implement his strategy, the new CEO of Intel is aware that you need all the human talent you can get, and for this reason he has decided to recover Glenn Hinton, one of the most important engineers that Intel has had in the last 30 years, and who until now was retired. We do not know the details that have allowed this hiring, but we suppose that Intel’s offer will have been quite interesting.
Glenn Hinton himself has confirmed his return to Intel through an update on your LinkedIn profile, where he has clearly said that he will return to work in a new project focused on the development of a high-performance processor. This means that Hinton will not primarily aim to develop an answer to the Apple M1 SoC, but rather return Intel to the crown of CPU performance, both multi-threaded and single-threaded, a crown that many of our readers will know, it lost upon arrival. of Zen 3.
Why is Glenn Hinton so important to Intel?
I am convinced that our most veteran readers will know, at least, part of the achievements of this engineer, but for those who do not, we will give a review of some of the most important:
- He participated as one of the main engineers in the development of the architectures used in the processors Intel Pentium Pro, Pentium II and Pentium III.
- He was one of the most responsible for the architectures used in the Pentium 4, and also in Intel Core. The latter marked an important turning point.
- It was also an important pillar in the development of technology HyperThreading, and in the creation of architecture Nehalem.
With all that on the table, it is easy to understand why Intel has wanted Glenn Hinton back, although it does leave us with two important questions. The first is because right now, and the second is related to that high-performance CPU project: will it be a totally new design with MCM base?
Answering the first question is not complicated. Intel has experienced a significant talent drain During the last years that, in the end, it has ended up taking its toll, there is no doubt about that. Recovering that talent is essential to recover the crown of performance, and to be able to create better processors.
Regarding the second question, I strongly believe that Intel will eventually make the leap to an MCM design sooner or later, more than anything because of all the advantages that this represents in terms of costs, performance in the wafer and ease when facing manufacturing process reductions. In this article we already discussed the advantages and disadvantages of the monolithic core designs and MCM designs used by Intel and AMD.
