Chip designer Jim Keller leaves Intel due to personal circumstances

Jim Keller has resigned from his position as senior vice president at Intel due to personal circumstances. He will continue to advise Intel for another six months, during which time he will help transfer his work.

Jim Keller

Intel will not comment further on the reasons for Keller’s departure. At the same time, the chip company is announcing some changes to the structure of its Technology, Systems Architecture and Client Group. For example, there will be an IP Engineering Group for chip intellectual property and the Xeon and Networking Engineering Group and Client Engineering Group will come under Gene Scuteri and Daaman Hejmadi respectively.

Jim Keller joined Intel in 2018. Before that, the chip architect worked at Tesla, AMD and Apple, among others. At Tesla he worked on chips for artificial intelligence, at AMD he co-designed the K7 and K8 architectures in the 1990s, and on his return in 2012 he was responsible for the Zen architecture, on which the Ryzen, Threadripper and Epyc processors are based.

In 2004, Keller was vice president of the Engineering Department at PA Semi. Apple took over this company, after which Keller made the designs for the Apple A4 and A5 socs within that company.