Top Intel engineers end up at startup

A NUMBER of high fliers from Intel are working in Beaverton, just down the road from an advanced Chipzilla R&D centre, for a startup specialising in advanced DSP architecture.

Those include Randy Steck, the CEO, who led the development and introduction of the Pentium II, the Pentium III and the Pentium IV and even the long lamented Pentium Pro.

The VP of marketing at Stexar worked for Intel, for Cyrix, for Nvidia and for Cirrus Logic.

And Gary Brown, design and programme manager of the Northwood processor at Intel - there since 1988 as a design and engineering manager and also a Willamette chap, is the VP of engineering.

The chief architect at Stexar is Darrell Boggs - an architect of a Pentium 4 Netbust generation, and a lead architect on the Pentium 4, as well as working on hyperthreading and speculative architectures.

And the firm also has a lawyer - Richard Calderwood - with 18 years of experience of intellectual property pleading. Nine years of those were at Intel, where he worked on patent and trade secret portfolio protection including the Itanic and the Pentium II and after.

Surely this mass desertion must worry the Intel campus up the road? µ