AMD CPU hero Jim Keller leaving Tesla to join Intel

Jim Keller is best known as the chip architect behind Athlon and the smash hit Ryzen CPUs for AMD, who joined Tesla to look over their Autopilot self-driving technology back in 2015. Well, he's leaving and he's joining Team Blue.

According to my industry sources Keller will be announcing he's joining Intel in the morning, with Intel securing another important ex-AMD staffer that will work closely with Raja Koduri, who left AMD as the boss of Radeon Technologies Group. Tesla very quietly hired Keller from AMD in 2016 after he was finished with the Ryzen architecture.

Keller was the brains behind Athlon when theGHz race between AMD and Intel was in full swing, and then he came back again to develop Ryzen. So we have Keller making a processor that had a higher frequency than Intel to beat them, left to join AMD when they made Ryzen which hurt Intel in the multi-threaded race on the consumer side of things, and now back to Intel.

Why? Raja Koduri.

Raja will be building out the IP blocks for the CPU and GPU side of things for Intel, while Keller will take those IP blocks and build chip designs out of them. Keller and Raja are both ex-Apple, ex-AMD, one half ex-Tesla and will now be joining forces at Intel.

Perfect timing as I just came out of Avengers: Infinity War and this team up news just fell into my lap. It looks like the boys are getting back together at Intel, with Raja and Jim to be joined by another ex-AMD staffer, with news of that arriving over the weekend, so stay hooked to TweakTown for that.