Is Intel poised for an executive overhaul?

Intel is expected to announce a major overhaul in its executive ranks on Monday, according to the New York Times.

Sean Maloney, executive vice president of sales and marketing, is now expected to assume control of a large part of the company’s operations, including PC, server, and graphics chips. Dadi Perlmutter, head of laptop chip design, will assume management of all of Intel’s chip engineering projects.

Meanwhile, Pat Gelsinger, head of the company’s digital enterprise group and a veteran of Intel for 30 years, is expected to leave the company for another high-tech company. The Wall Street Journal separately reported that the 48-year-old Gelsinger has been poached by storage company EMC, which has hired him to run its storage products operations and some smaller software divisions.

Maloney is expected to be the heir apparent to Paul Otellini, chief executive of Intel, the world’s biggest chip maker. Intel declined to comment to the New York Times and has not yet responded to an email from VentureBeat.

It isn’t clear just what triggered this change. Intel has a deep management bench and it is fairly methodical about setting up succession plans for its executives, particularly since the untimely death of Robert N. Noyce, the founding CEO of Intel, who died in 1990.

Gelsinger, who was one of Intel’s top chip architects for the 386 and 486 generations when Intel set itself apart from the pack of rivals in the 1980s and early 1990s, has been mentioned as a possible heir apparent in the past. But Maloney has been a rising star ever since he served as technical assistant to former Intel CEO Andy Grove.