Following the announcement of Pat Gelsinger's appointment as CEO starting in February, Intel is bringing back another freshman to the company, Glenn Hinton, who was the lead architect of the Intel Nehalem architecture, "an exciting high-performance CPU project." He is returning from retirement for.

Hinton announced his return on LinkedIn (via CRN reporter Dylan Martin of Tom's Hardware), citing Pat Gelsinger's return as Intel's CEO in February as the final As a push, he revealed that he had been considering a new role since November. And he hopes that Intel will announce a CPU project that appeals to Hinton's sensibilities.

"I wouldn't have come back if it wasn't a fun project," Hinton said in response to comments.

During his 35-year tenure at Intel, as lead architect of the Nehalem CPU, Hinton previously oversaw Intel's most important and enduring architecture review. This architecture became the basis for the Core processor lineup that is still in operation today, and represented a major shift from Intel's previous escapades in trying to reach high clock speeds with the Pentium 4.

The architecture proved successful upon its launch in 2008, and its continued success allowed Intel to maintain a steady lead in the CPU industry for most of the decade.

That is, until now.Faced with new challenges like AMD Ryzen, Intel is looking for ways to push the boat out again in CPU design, and Alder Lake is going to do that to some extent, but perhaps what Intel thinks is most exciting is its planned far in advance.