Sailesh Kottapalli, Intel Fellow, Platform Engineering Group Director, Data Center Processor Architecture, joined Intel in 1996 as a design engineer working on the first Intel® Itanium® processor, then code-named "Merced." Subsequently, he served as lead engineer for several Intel Itanium and Intel Xeon processor evaluations, and more recently, as lead architect for a series of Intel Xeon server processors. His work in this area earned Kottapalli an Intel Achievement Award for delivering record generational performance improvements in a high-end server product. An active participant in industry and internal conferences, Kottapalli has authored or co-authored several published technical papers, delivered talks and taken part in roundtables and panel discussions. He has also been granted approximately three dozen patents in processor architecture, with additional patents pending. Kottapalli holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from Andhra University in India and a master's degree in computer engineering from Virginia Tech.