Rumor: AMD Zen microarchitecture designer joins Intel

Chip designer Jim Keller no longer works at car manufacturer Tesla and will focus again on designing processors. He is rumored to be doing that at Intel. Keller previously worked as Chief Architect at AMD on the architecture of the Ryzen processors.

Keller has left Tesla, the company has confirmed to website Electrek. The carmaker says that Keller will again fully focus on designing processors at another company. It is not yet officially known which company that is, but sources from the website state that it concerns Intel. Also tech journalist Ryan Shroud says confirm from own sources that Jim Keller will be joining Intel.

Jim Keller and Intel have not officially announced anything yet. If Keller does indeed join Intel, he would be the second former AMD CEO to join the competitor. Last year, Raja Koduri, the chief architect of the Radeon Techonlogy Group, left for Intel, where he now works on GPUs as chief architect and senior vice president of the new Core and Visual Computing Group.

Keller is known as one of the best known and most important CPU architects. In the 1990s, he worked at AMD on the K7 and K8 architectures. In 1999 he left the company and worked at Apple, among others, on the A4 and A5 socs. In 2012, he returned to AMD, where he developed the Zen architecture, which is the basis for the Ryzen processors.

In 2016, Keller left AMD again to join Tesla. There he worked on chips for artificial intelligence. Keller’s position at Tesla is now filled by Pete Bannon, a CPU designer who also worked at Apple and was previously recruited by the automaker.