Intel has pulled in a PowerPC Somerset Design Center veteran to head-up a new long-range R&D centre in Austin, Texas. Mark McDermott comes from the Motorola side of the old PowerPC alliance, and also ran the system on a chip design group at Motorola's Advanced Systems Technology Lab. It's not yet entirely clear what he and his team will be designing - Intel is reportedly saying that's going to depend on the staff he hires, and if this is the case we can maybe think of him and the company being on some kind of fishing expedition, looking for star designers and star technologies. From that point of view Austin isn't a bad place to look. It houses Motorola, IBM, Dell and an excellent university, and at least until the great DRAM disaster was a happening place for semiconductors. And beer, we seem to remember. Austin's also the location of Intel's StrongARM design operation, but this will continue to be run separately. Perhaps McDermott can have a go at hiring back all the Digital engineers who ran for it when Intel took over StrongARM. ® Click for more stories