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Justin Rattner, Intel’s CTO and director of Intel Labs, is stepping down from the positions in compliance with company bylaws that block employees from serving as corporate officers after they turn 65.
Rattner, who has been with Intel since 1973 after stints with Hewlett-Packard and Xerox, will return to Intel after taking an immediate personal leave to deal with what Intel officials called “a pressing family matter.” What role he takes after returning hasn’t been determined yet.
Until another appointment is made, the Intel Labs group will report to company President Renee James.
In his job as CTO and head of Intel Labs, Rattner had become a fixture at such company events as the Intel Developer Forum, where he normally gave the final day’s keynote to talk about Intel’s future plans.
In a statement, CEO Brian Krzanich credited Rattner for “creating one of the leading research organizations in the high-tech industry.”
The staff at Intel Labs also recognized Rattner, saying in a June 27 post on the Intel blog that “because of Justin, we are now recognized as one of the leading research labs in the high-tech industry. He has not only built a legacy of significant individual achievements, but has also challenged us to achieve great things for Intel.”
The staff listed among those accomplishments the development of the Intel Power Architecture, which helped lead to the 20-times power reduction for the “Haswell” architecture, and the creation of the DeepSAFE anti-malware technology developed after Intel bought security software maker McAfee in 2011 for more than $7.68 billion.
In addition, the staff credited Rattner for driving the development of the Thunderbolt I/O technology that is found in most of the latest Apple Macintosh products and is coming out in other systems as well, and parallel JavaScript, which enables Web programmers to efficiently write to multi- and many-core processors.
Rattner “has been our mentor, our guide, and our leader,” the Intel Labs staff wrote. “His approach, abilities and attitude have inspired us as individuals. He challenged us to think bigger, and helped us realize our own potential to change the world.”
In 1979, Rattner was named Intel’s first principal engineer. He was named its fourth Intel Fellow in 1988 and was in the first group of Intel Fellows to be named Senior Fellow in 2001, according to the company.
He also has received many industry awards, most recently the Industry Luminary Award for 21st Century Industrial Innovation from the Open Innovation Strategy and Policy Group.
The announcement about Rattner’s resignation came just days after the latest of Intel’s Research@Intel events, which highlight the company’s and the lab’s latest accomplishments. At the event in San Francisco June 25, Intel showed off such innovations as technology that can help detect a person’s presence in a store, giving retailers the ability to offer a more personalized shopping experience, and work aimed at helping people better capture, move and work with digital information. There also were demonstrations related to creating a more intelligent, connected home and ways to further develop the hardware and software building blocks that allow for such capabilities.