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AMD Brings Back Athlon K8 Designer as Chief Architect

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the alpha-king-of-architectures dept.

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."

11 of 63 comments (clear)

  1. From "more cores" mantra to "smarter cores" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Let's hope he will guide the development team to squeeze as much performance per-core rather than slap more and more cores....

    1. Re:From "more cores" mantra to "smarter cores" by Iniamyen · · Score: 2

      Poo on efficiency; I want to be able to use my computer as a space heater, like I did with my Athlon XP!

  2. interesting loss from the other side by Trepidity · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    1. Re:interesting loss from the other side by Ironhandx · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:interesting loss from the other side by serviscope_minor · · Score: 5, Insightful

      K8, one of the most under-rated chips of all time

      You misspelled "kept from market dominance by illegal abuse of monopoly by intel".

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      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    3. Re:interesting loss from the other side by Ironhandx · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I did. Thank you for fixing that for me.

      If it wasn't for pre-existing exclusivity deals and pushes against it by intel at the time Intel probably would have been forced to burn through their entire cash-on-hand supply to catch up rather than just half of it.

    4. Re:interesting loss from the other side by Ironhandx · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Besides people correcting you, the Phenom and Phenom II chips were by no means "bad" excepting a few pricing faux-pahs where they priced new parts too high for their relative performance out of the gates.

      There are actually very few(nearly none) video games out there that max out any CPU these days. Its all GPU now. The physics engines pretty much do as much as they are going to and all thats left is to make it shinier.

      I bought my FX4100 purely because of how quiet I can make this thing run. The loudest thing in it is the 800 RPM PSU fan and the computer is overclocked.

      Which actually brings me to a pet-peeve about bulldozer. They've underclocked these chips by a LOT. Its actually ridiculous what they've done to themselves. This computer idles at room temp and hits maybe 40 Celcius under load on chip temp, and its overclocked about 600 MHZ which yields something like a 25% total increase in performance. In other words its competitive with an I5 or low end I7s for $100 or more less cost. The best part is any idiot can overclock it with one of these new UEFI boards from Asus, they don't even have to know how to install software or navigate a bios by keyboard.

  3. Re:I'm waiting for the next version by thsths · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Haha, the K10 is long out, and while not bad, it is no where near as revolutionary as the K8. Of course the K8 was competing against the P4, which could be called a dog or an easy target.

    If he can repeat what he did with the K8 (and if it was indeed due to his leadership), than AMD again has a chance. If not, they will end up like VIA and all the other Intel competitors, somewhere in a niche market.

  4. Yay! by Lord+Lode · · Score: 2

    Go design some awesome CPU's and bring back the competition between Intel and AMD!

  5. Re:good post by uglyduckling · · Score: 2

    At $69/hr she would have worked 11hr/day 5 days per week to earn that money. That's not really a few hours.

  6. Re:SWEET! by halltk1983 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Well, to be fair, Intel doesn't have to write drivers that work at over 15 fps...

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    Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.