San Francisco, Jan 13 (IANS): In a big development, Intel CEO Bob Swan is stepping down from February 15 and Pat Gelsinger, CEO of enterprise virtualisation leader VMWare, will take over his position, CNBC reported on Wednesday.

Swan was named CEO in January 2019 after serving as interim CEO for seven months.

Gelsinger has served as CEO of VMware since September 2012.

Prior to becoming CEO of VMware he was President and Chief Operating Officer, EMC Information Infrastructure Products at EMC.

Before joining EMC, he was the first CTO of Intel Corporation and Senior Vice-president and General Manager of the Digital Enterprise Group at Intel.

For both Swan and Gelsinger, India has always been a strategic and growth-oriented market.

Intel's stock was up about 13 per cent while VMWare's stock went down nearly 5 per cent after the news broke.

"In December, Third Point, a hedge fund led by Dan Loeb, urged Intel's board to explore 'strategic alternatives.' That came after Intel lost market share to competitors AMD, Samsung and TSMC," the report mentioned.

Intel was likely to issue an official statement on the development later.

"During Swan's tenure, Intel has suffered blows from competitors. Over the summer, Intel reported that its latest generation chips would be delayed while AMD's were already shipping inside laptops," the report claimed.

Apple in last fall announced to break up its 15-year association with Intel for Macs, going for its own M1 Silicon chip and the new Macs are already out in the market.

The enterprise software major VMware completed the acquisition of US-based Pivotal Software, a leading Cloud-native platform provider for $2.7 billion, in December last month.