Intel confirms hire of former AMD CPU architect Jim Keller from Tesla

Mastermind behind first CPU to hit 1GHz clock speed lured to Intel

Jim Keller, the chip designer during what was arguably AMD's most successful spell to date, has been lured from Tesla to Intel.

In a statement, Intel confirmed reports that it had lured Keller to the Santa Clara, California-based company.

Keller joins as senior vice president and will lead the company's silicon engineering, including system-on-chip development and integration.

The statement hinted at a shake-up at the company following AMD's successful launch of Ryzen, its latest line of desktop and laptop CPUs based on the Zen microarchitecture, which Keller worked on up until his departure to Tesla in 2015.

"We have embarked on exciting initiatives to fundamentally change the way we build the silicon as we enter the world of heterogeneous process and architectures. Jim joining us will help accelerate this transformation," said Dr Murthy Renduchintala, Intel's chief engineering officer and group president of the Technology, Systems Architecture & Client Group (TSCG) at Intel.

Keller had been at Tesla since 2015 and had recently taken over responsibility for the company's Autopilot autonomous driving programme following the departure from the company of Chris Lattner, on top of his role as vice president of low voltage hardware. Keller's last day at Tesla was, apparently, Wednesday 25 April.

The hire of Keller back in 2015 had stimulated speculation that Tesla was interested in developing its own silicon to support its self-driving ambitions.

Keller boasts more than 20 years of experience in x86 and ARM-based microarchitecture design across PCs, servers, mobile and vehicles, at DEC - where he worked on the Alpha microprocessor - AMD, PA Semiconductor and Apple, where he worked on the A4 and A5 ARM-based CPUs.

He will probably be best known for his work at AMD, which helped the company to become the first to breach the 1GHz chip-speed barrier, beating Intel to the record. He returned to AMD from Apple in 2012 to work on the company's Zen microarchitecture, which was finally launched with the Ryzen microprocessor line from February last year.

"The world will be a very different place in the next decade as a result of where computing is headed. I am excited to join the Intel team to build the future of CPUs, GPUs, accelerators and other products for the data-centric computing era," said Keller.