Intel hires former AMD chip designer Jim Kellereller

Intel has confirmed it is hiring Jim Keller. The chip designer, whose name includes AMD Zen architecture, will become senior vice president of the silicon engineering department.

Jim Keller

In his role at Intel, 59-year-old Jim Keller will lead the development of new chips. Intel announced the appointment of Jim Keller in a press release, after it came out on Thursday that the chip designer no longer works at Tesla and will focus entirely on developing processors at another company.

Jim Keller is a renowned chip architect who made a name for himself designing energy-efficient chips. He was one of the founders of the Apple A4, the soc that the smartphone manufacturer used in the iPhone 4. The Apple A5 is also his hand.

Before his time at Apple, Keller already worked at AMD. In the 1990s he worked there on the K7 and K8 architectures. Between 2012 and 2016, Keller returned to AMD, where he developed the Zen architecture, which is the basis for the Ryzen processors.

Jim Keller has spent the past two years working on chips for artificial intelligence at Tesla. He will start in his new position at Intel on April 30 and is the second former AMD CEO to join the company. Last year Intel already managed to get Raja Koduri, who was responsible for designing Radeon GPUs. At Intel he is now working on GPUs.