Intel’s troubles continue to mount as four of its top CPU engineers and architects have left the company to form a RISC-V startup.

AheadComputing was founded by the following former Intel engineers:

• Dr. Debbie Marr, “an Intel Fellow and Chief Architect of the Advanced Architecture Development Group (AADG) at Intel.”
• Jonathan Pearce, “an Intel Principal Engineer, CPU Architect and a key technologist & strategist in the Advanced Architecture Development Group.”
• Dr. Srikanth Srinivasan, “an industry expert on microprocessor architecture and microarchitecture with over 20 years of technical leadership experience in product R&D.”
• Mark Dechene, “an Intel Principal Engineer and CPU Architect in the Advanced Architecture Development Group.”

According to the company website, the four architects have more than 80 years of experiencing designing microprocessors. The company’s focus is “designing, verifying, and licensing compelling RISC-V core IP.”

RISC-V is an open architecture that is poised to take on Arm, as well as Intel and AMD, that is increasingly gaining traction in the tech world. As a result, it’s an attractive platform to build a chip startup around.

The departures are bad news for Intel, however, as the company struggles to turn things around. The company recently announced layoffs impacting some 15,000 employees. That news comes on the heels of issues with its 13 and 14th-gen chips, issues securing foundry customers, some quarterly reports that can only be described as a bloodbath, and a continuing erosion of its leadership in the semiconductor market.

In one of Intel’s cost-saving moves, the company announced pay cuts impacting Principle Engineers and other executives in February 2023 in an effort to continue paying investors a dividend . At the time, WPN wrote this about the company’s plans:

Intel’s strategy is an incredibly dangerous one since it risks alienating the very employees and engineers the company needs to turn things around. Cutting employees’ pay, in the middle of an economic downturn no less, sends a clear message to employees that they are not as important to leadership as lining investors’ pockets.

Our money is on this decision coming back to haunt Intel, with the company likely to start losing its top talent to companies that won’t sell them out.

Given that the four founders of AheadComputing fit into the group whose pay was cut, it seems Intel is reaping exactly what we predicted.