Thursday, April 26th 2018

Ryzen Architect Jim Keller Joins Intel
Jim Keller, the VLSI guru who led the team behind AMD's spectacular comeback in the x86 processor market with "Zen," has reportedly quit his job at Tesla to join AMD's bête noire, Intel. Following his work on "Zen," Keller had joined Tesla to work on self-driving car hardware. Keller joins Raja Koduri at Intel, the other big former-AMD name, who led Radeon Technologies Group (RTG).
PC Perspective comments that big names like Keller and Koduri joining Intel could provide clues as to Intel's current state and the direction it's heading in. The company appears to be in a state of shake-up from a decade of complacency and lethargy in its core business. Koduri could be putting together a team of people familiar to him for a new clean-slate project. The last time Intel had a clean slate was ten years ago, with "Nehalem."
Source:
PC Perspective
PC Perspective comments that big names like Keller and Koduri joining Intel could provide clues as to Intel's current state and the direction it's heading in. The company appears to be in a state of shake-up from a decade of complacency and lethargy in its core business. Koduri could be putting together a team of people familiar to him for a new clean-slate project. The last time Intel had a clean slate was ten years ago, with "Nehalem."
81 Comments on Ryzen Architect Jim Keller Joins Intel
On the RTG front I'm not really sad that Mr. Coduri left the helm. There should've been fork in architecture at RTG some years back. GCN based Polaris and Vega cards are just simply not efficient enough on the gaming front and I mean that in manufacturing and power consumption fashion.
Hopefully Lisa Su can shake up RTG the sameway as they did on the CPU front.
I just said I don't understand why he put Jim and Raja in the same basket only to conclude this is "shit". Raja could be seen as an AMD guy, but Jim is very different from a career point of view. Jim left AMD exactly when his work on Zen ended. He only designs this stuff, implementation, tweaking and manufacturing aren't part of his job descriptions.
My takeaway is Intel's in-house engineering team was unable to come up with a significantly better x86 implementation on their own, so they had to hire some help. Either that or Intel could be working on something new entirely and is building a new team to do it.
And Raja is talented, yes. But we'll see how RTG does with what they have going now.
This is how it really works guys.
Jim Keller only stuck around for Ryzen that was a part of his contract so as soon as his contract was up he left. He is going to move around the industry wherever the money is at that point of time so obviously it doesn't matter where he goes