Intel has lost one of its best, with 20-year veteran François Piednoël leaving the company. Piednoël was involved in the development of some of Intel's biggest CPU architecture development, including Katmai, Conroe, Penryn, and Nehalem as well as SoCs in Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell, Broadwell, Skylake, and Kaby Lake.
Piednoël leaving Intel at this time is very strange, especially as AMD is back into the game in a very big way after nearly a decade out of the high-end enthusiast CPU market. AMD is preparing the launch of its new Ryzen ThreadRipper processors that will bring 16C/32T CPUs to the masses, and Intel loses one of its chief CPU engineers. He won't be joining AMD, that's for sure - as he tweeted out a reply to someone saying "going to AMD", he said: "NEVER!" with a follow up tweet asking "why "NEVER!" to which Piednoël replied: "Because my knowledge about Intel is too deep, I would get lawyers knocking on my door next day".
Intel seems to be finding more and more holes in its ship, is there something bigger going on that we can't see yet?