AMD Brings Back Athlon K8 Designer as Chief Architect

MojoKid writes with exciting news from AMD. From the article: "After more than six months of high-to-mid profile executive departures, AMD has major news to announce on its new executive hire — and he's a welcome addition. Starting today, Jim Keller will serve as a Vice President and the company's Chief Architect for CPU Cores. Keller has spent more than thirty years in the semiconductor business, including a few at AMD. When AMD brought members of DEC's Alpha team aboard in the late 1990s, Keller was one of the CPU architects that came along. Having worked on Alpha's EV5, Jim was lead architect on the first K8 project. Keller moved on and eventually became one of the core members of PA Semi which was bought by Apple in 2007."

Comments

interesting loss from the other side

[Trepidity]

Keller didn't just accidentally end up at Apple as the result of the purchase of PA Semi; the consensus is that PA Semi were specifically bought to acquire the team led by Keller, moreso than Apple caring about the company itself (i.e. it was what startups these days like to call an "acquihire"). Keller headed the A4/A5 design at Apple (the system-on-a-chip in the iPhone and iPad), so there's now a noticeable staffing gap if they plan to continue in-house development of their mobile chips.

Re:interesting loss from the other side

[Ironhandx]

Besides that this guy designed the K8, one of the most under-rated chips of all time, and set the direction for AMD that led to the AMD64 chip that had Intel flubbing about looking for an answer for nearly two whole years from a company that at the time was struggling to stay afloat.

AMDs entire cash-on-hand balance can be nearly directly credited to this man.

I'm not what you'd call a fanboy, but I am a fan of AMD products(in particular since they acquired ATI). Lets hope this guy can bring some of the bang back.