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David “Dadi” Perlmutter, an executive vice president at Intel who has been at the chip maker for more than three decades, will leave the company in February 2014, officials said in an Oct. 18 regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
According to the filing, made public Oct. 23, Perlmutter will leave Feb. 20, 2014—the 34th anniversary of his start at Intel—”to pursue other opportunities in his life and his professional career.”
“Throughout his career at Intel, Mr. Perlmutter led many of the product, technology and business transformations at Intel,” officials said in the filing.
Perlmutter, who is executive vice president and general manager of the Intel Architecture Group, was considered a leading candidate earlier this year to replace outgoing CEO Paul Otellini. However, that job went to Brian Krzanich, who had been Intel’s chief operating officer and came from the manufacturing side. Meanwhile Renee James, who oversaw the company’s growing software business, took over as president.
Perlmutter’s departure doesn’t come as a complete surprise. Almost immediately after Krzanich took over the CEO seat in May, he announced that he was taking charge of the Intel Architecture Group, which oversees the creation and manufacturing of the processors that go into everything from servers and PCs to smartphones and tablets. In a memo to employees, Krzanich said Perlmutter would help with the transition of the unit and then be assigned other duties within the company, though what those duties would be was unclear.
Perlmutter came to Intel in 1980 after he graduated from the Technion Institute of Technology in Israel. He was the driver behind the Centrino mobile chip platform, which debuted more than a decade ago and accelerated the drive to wireless computing. He later was instrumental in the development of such products as the Core portfolio of chips, which replaced the Pentium as the primary platform for PCs.
Intel continues to dominate the PC chip space, but is still trying to find greater traction in the mobile device market, where systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) from ARM and manufacturing partners like Samsung and Qualcomm are found in most smartphones and tablets.