AMD K8 architecture designer joins Tesla’s autopilot division

Jim Keller will start as vice president of Tesla’s Autopilot Hardware Engineering division. Keller is a CPU architect who has worked on the AMD K8, AMD Zen and Apple A4 and A5 architectures, among others. He left AMD last September.

Keller’s arrival at Tesla has been confirmed to Electrek by the company. “Jim will bring together the best internal and external hardware techniques to develop the safest and most advanced autopilot system in the world,” Tesla said.

Keller is a prominent CPU architect who worked on the K7 and K8 architectures at AMD in the 1990s. AMD based its most successful chips, the Athlon 64 models and the first Opterons, on the K8 microarchitecture. He left in 1999 and later joined PA Semi, which was acquired by Apple, where Keller helped develop the A4 and A5 socs.

In 2012, Keller rejoined AMD as Chief Architect of Microprocessor Cores to develop the Zen architecture. The first processors based on this architecture should appear at the end of this year and AMD hopes to be able to make a fist against Intel with this.

It is unlikely that Keller will design chips at Tesla, but Tesla seems to be developing its own system for autonomous driving. Tesla uses Nvidia socs for infotainment systems, but does not seem to opt for Nvidia’s Drive PX 2 system for autonomous driving.