A 90-person-strong ASIC design team from Hewlett Packard Co. officially started work in their new offices at Intel Corp. Monday (Sept 24).

And a month ago, a group of 200 crack microprocessor engineers from Compaq Computer Corp. spent their first day at Intel. They were part of a first wave. Another group of about 200 Compaq processor designers will move to Intel starting in the spring. And one analyst believes Intel will get one or two more design teams from HP in the next year.

Perhaps the most amazing aspect of the design team exodus is how smoothly it's going. Reportedly only one employee of Compaq's Alpha EV-8 design team did not make the shift to Intel at the end of August — and she was preparing to go on maternity leave.

"We had a huge success rate. Only one person did not come to Intel," said Mike Aymar, the Intel executive responsible for overseeing the transition.

The success rate even surprised Intel, said one Compaq engineer who made the move but asked not to be named. But he wondered aloud whether they will all stay, "when they realize what they are getting into" in terms of the very driven and very disciplined atmosphere at Intel. "The have a process for everything — including a process for processes," he joked.

Indeed the acquisition of the Alpha EV-8 and EV-7 processor teams from Compaq and HP's server chip set group are an indication of Intel's resolve to win the battle for market share in servers against the likes of IBM and Sun Microsystems. The Alpha designers are already at work speeding new members of Intel's IA-64 processor Itanium family to market. Ultimately the EV-8 team will design a next-generation Itanium microarchitecture, probably for delivery in 2004 or later. The HP team will design high-performance chip sets that could expand Intel's prowess in multiprocessing servers.

"Intel expects Itanium to dominate the server market in two or three years' time," so they are loading up with designers "by the bushel full," said Linley Gwennap, a longtime Itanium watcher and independent consultant at The Linley Group (Mountain View, Calif.) "Their level of investment is consistent with that expectation."

Mike Fister, general manager of Intel's Enterprise Platforms Group, which is responsible for the Itanium, won't reveal the percentage boost the 500 new EEs give its existing server design team. "It's a sizable increase," Fister said. "We are very serious about this architecture, and hitting our goals takes a lot of people and effort. And there's a value in an intact team who has worked together for years and years."

Indeed, Dan Casaletto traces his history with the EV-8 group back to days designing PDP-11 systems at Digital Equipment Corp. He is one of many engineers who have worked at the same Shrewsbury, Mass., office for three companies — Digital, Compaq and now Intel.

"Now we are part of a semiconductor company for the first time, and our product is the end product," said Casaletto, general manager of the group that has been renamed the Intel Massachusetts Microprocessor Design Center.

The mood of Casaletto's team quickly turned from loss at having its EV-8 project canceled to something more upbeat. "I think that's because it became clearer and clearer that there was a cloud hanging over us about how much Compaq could invest," said Casaletto in his heavy Boston accent.

Keeping the team intact, building and boss included, was one of the techniques to make the acquisition work, said Aymar. After a long string of acquisitions in the communications space, Intel has set best practices for integration, including having at the ready a tiger team of Intel staffers to quickly iron out everything from compensation plans and CAD systems to briefings on security policies.

"We now have a ton of people who can parachute in," said Aymar, who manages an integration team of a couple dozen Intel staffers. "We've learned you need to overwhelm them with a ton of HR and technical and other people," he said.

Just days after their orientation, Casaletto was named manager of the group, and three other top Compaq engineers were named Intel fellows and given top engineering management roles. That's a big difference from Intel's acquisition of Digital Semiconductor several years ago, when the company quickly lost Rich Witek, a key StrongARM designer who took many of his colleagues with him to Tality, and later, to startup Alchemy Semiconductor.

"Intel bought the StrongARM design team and got basically nothing," said Gwennap. "Anytime there are people involved, there are no shackles on their feet. Now I would say Intel has changed the way it manages and pays its engineers, and there is the perception that Intel is doing leading-edge stuff now," a change from the view back in the heyday of RISC microprocessors.

The HP transition was also a smooth one by all accounts, with Intel losing just one high-profile member, team's leader Andy DeBaets, who is now senior director of systems and applications engineering at Xilinx. "I was looking for a smaller company," said DeBaets.

HP realized systems sales wouldn't support the level of R&D the chip set group required, so it put out word to three companies who might be interested. Intel was first to respond and the only one asking for the entire group.

"I think pretty much everybody went over. There was a pretty short fuse on the time frame for accepting a job, and the job market is pretty bad, so people didn't have all that many alternatives," DeBaets said. "As you can imagine, it was a pretty big surprise and people had a lot of emotions about it, but now they are pretty excited about their new situation. They know Intel values what they do."

The team's last job was designing a chip set that could enable multiprocessing systems with up to 64 HP PA-RISC processors. The four chips ranged in complexity from 12 million to 24 million transistors. With the addition of one additional ASIC, the set could be applied to Itanium systems, DeBaets noted. Intel would not comment on just what the group would work on in its new role; however, Intel's current chip sets do not support such large multiprocessing configurations.

"They are a top-notch design group with 90 people with an average of 10 years' experience each. They did things in chip sets no one had ever done before," DeBaets said.

Analyst Gwennap expects that within a year, HP will also transfer its PA-RISC and Itanium engineers to Intel as it streamlines in its proposed merger with Compaq. "If HP will outsource its chip sets to Intel, why not outsource the processor as well?" he asked.

Neither Intel nor HP would comment on any plans to transition the HP processor designers. However, one source close to the companies said there are no current plans for such a move.

Intel says it will extend and accelerate its Itanium road map thanks to the 500 new EEs, but it's not easy getting a read on the exact direction or rate of growth. "Our intent is the EV-8 team will work on a completely new microarchitecture to take us to a new level of performance," said Aymar.

In the near term, some are working on speeding existing Itanium CPU designs to market and others — including part of the Compaq team in a Nashua, N.H., facility — are expanding the operating system and compiler support for Itanium.

Casaletto said his team is working on both the top-down customer requirements for a new Itanium microarchitecture and a bottom's-up analysis of the current CPU structure with which it must be compatible, trying to "get through the discovery phase ASAP."

While both Itanium and Alpha engineers were working on multithreading technologies, Intel's HyperThreading and the EV-8's simultaneous multithreading schemes "are different beasts with the same intent," said Casaletto. "There have been a lot of exchanges on that. The approach we had was more directed at an out of order execution engine, more like the IA-32 than Itanium.

"The debate is how to get performance gains without power going out of sight," he added. "Power is starting to get away from us. With Alpha we didn't put a lot of emphasis on power . . . the tough thing now is packing in a lot of parallelism and keeping a lid on power."

Actually that's just one of the many challenges. The group is also coming up to speed on a new computing environment (HP and PC workstations running Linux instead of Alpha workstations using Comapq's Tru64 Unix), a new flow of design tools and process technologies, new packaging capabilities and a new microarchitecture. It's a heady job, says Casaletto, and maybe one of the reasons why it really helps to hire a whole team en masse to take the plunge, rather than doing it one engineer at a time.