Jim Keller leaves Tesla to join Intel

Intel is not taking the threats posed by AMD and Nvidia lying down, gobbling up industry talent to fundamentally change the way that the company designs their products.

Jim Keller, a key player behind AMD’s Athlon K7 and Zen architectures, has left Tesla and has secured a place at Intel, making him the second former AMD heavyweight to join the CPU giant. This hire is a huge step from Intel, who have until now relied mostly on homegrown talent to design their future products.  

In recent history Keller has worked for Apple to create their custom iPhone SoCs, AMD to create Zen and Tesla to develop autonomous driving chips. Now it appears as if Raja Koduri, another recent hire from Intel, has convinced Keller to jump on board, potentially to boost Intel’s core development team. 

Ever since Sandy Bridge. Intel’s architectures have not changed significantly from a consumer perspective.  Only recently has the company moved from quad-cores to hex-cores on their mainstream desktop platforms with the introduction of Coffee Lake while generating relatively small IPC improvements year-over-year, allowing their competitors to catch up despite their lower R&D budgets.   

With the delays from Intel’s manufacturing teams, the company cannot rely on process technologies to regain their technological leadership, forcing the company to invest in new talent from outside the company and look into new markets like dedicated graphics.