Former Intel bigwig Anand Chandrasekher has joined Qualcomm as chief marketing officer (CMO).
Chandrasekher is expected to oversee external communications and global marketing of mobile RISC-based processors – reporting to Steve Mollenkopf, president and COO of Qualcomm.
As noted above, Chandrasekher was formerly senior VP and general manager for the Ultra Mobility Group at Intel Corporation, with responsibility for the Intel x86 Atom processor family.
Veteran tech journalist Mike Magee of TechEye previously described Chandrasekher’s former position at Intel as “a hot potato of a job.”
“For some years now, the chip giant has been talking about how we’ll see smaller form factors everywhere – we are seeing a plethora of different designs,” Magee wrote in an analysis posted on TechEye.
“Unfortunately, from Intel’s point of view, many of these different designs use ARM-based microprocessors, rather than Intel chips. Design wins for phones are few – several vendors in the handset business have told me that the last thing they want is for Intel to have any dominating business in that sphere.”
Of course, Chandrasekher isn’t alone in ditching an x86 heavyweight and moving to Qualcomm. Indeed, Eric Demers recently left his job as CTO and VP of AMD’s graphics division to manage Qualcomm’s Adreno graphics as the company gears up for the advent of Microsoft Windows 8 and the expected slew of graphics-hungry mobile devices.
