His name is Michael Wolfe. He’s 52 and has worked for HP for five years, most recently as VP for Information Technology. This will be his second go as a CIO. Before his stint at HP, he spent 24 years at Motorola’s Semiconductor Unit and was CIO during the period it was spun out to become Freescale Semiconductor.

His new boss, AMD’s interim CEO Thomas Seifert, had high praise. “Mike has effectively led IT transformations constantly focusing on reducing operating costs and significantly improving business innovation,” he said in a statement. “His considerable talent and experience will help AMD to continue strengthening our IT infrastructure and streamline our business based on our own products and platforms.”

This hiring is taking place against the backdrop of the complicated, difficult search for a new CEO at AMD following the surprise resignation of Dirk Meyer in January. COO Robert Rivet soon followed.

AMD shares haven’t moved much since then, and it has been the subject of recurring problematic buyout rumors. Today the shares closed at $8.55, unchanged from the prior session, and that’s up only a nickel from where it was at the start of the year. Shares fell five cents in after-hours trading. Investors seem to consider AMD a company in a holding pattern until there’s some resolution in the corner office.

The new heads of Intel’s Ultra Mobility Group are Mike Bell and Dave Whalen.

David Perlmutter, executive vice president and Intel Architecture Group general manager, said in a statement that Intel “remains committed” to the Atom business, which Intel calls its Ultra Mobility Group. “We continue to make the investments needed to ensure that the best user experience on smartphones and handhelds runs on Intel architecture, and to ship a phone this year.”

The fact is, however, that for all Intel’s efforts, Atom hasn’t gotten very far. While it’s been a favorite of the netbook set–the small form factor PCs that were so popular before Apple’s iPad showed up on the scene–the Atom chip has largely failed to even mount a challenge against chips based on the ARM architecture in tablets and smartphones. In fact, as we saw at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, the reverse is true. ARM-based chips are now aiming at traditional notebook-type devices running full versions of Windows.

Well, the ambushes to which Smith referred appear to have finally paid off: Intel (INTC) has landed a deal to develop chips with Nokia (NOK).

During a conference call this morning, Intel senior mobility VP Anand Chandrasekher announced a deal that will see the two companies developing something they ambiguously describe as a “new mobile platform beyond today’s smartphones, notebooks and netbooks.” Under its terms, they will work together on several open-source mobile Linux software projects and Intel will license Nokia’s high speed packet access technology.

“This Intel and Nokia collaboration unites and focuses many of the brightest computing and communications minds in the world, and will ultimately deliver open and standards-based technologies, which history shows drive rapid innovation, adoption and consumer choice,” Chandrasekher said in a statement. “With the convergence of the Internet and mobility as the team’s only barrier, I can only imagine the innovation that will come out of our unique relationship with Nokia. The possibilities are endless.”

The deal is a big win for Intel, whose last dalliance with the cellphone market ended in ignominy. The computing landscape is shifting from PCs to mobile devices and Intel must shift along with it in order to grow its business. And right now, 90 percent of its sales are PC-related. With the global market for cellphones at 1.2 billion units per year and growing, according to ABI Research, the chipmaker must figure out a way to dominate cellphones the way it has PCs. Allying with Nokia is one way of achieving that. But when will we see the first Intel-powered Nokia device? Intel and Nokia won’t say. “This is about technology collaboration and a licensing agreement,” Chandrasekher said in reply to repeated questions on the matter. “We are not commenting on specific products today, I’ll leave it at that. When we are ready to talk about products, we will.”

Incidentally, Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo was a speaker at our D7 conference. A video highlights reel of his appearance, below.