Chip design guru Jim Keller leaves Intel

Jim Keller

Jim Keller, a prominent chip design specialist, has resigned from Intel after just two years, citing personal reasons.

For more than 20-years, Keller has led the design of a number of significant microarchitectures at companies such as AMD, Apple and Broadcom.

He served as the Intel's senior vice president in the Technology, Systems Architecture and Client Group and also the general manager of the Silicon Engineering Group from 2018.

Intel said it appreciated Keller's work in helping them to advance product leadership and that they wished him and his family all the best for the future. He will continue to serve as a consultant for the next six months to assist the transition.

Keller graduated from Pennsylvania State University with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. He has more than 20-years of experience with chip design across a broad range of platforms from PCs to Smartphones and even cars.

He joined AMD in 1998, working on the firms Athlon processor and leading the architecture of its K8 microarchitecture. He left, after just a year, to work at SiByte, which was acquired by Broadcom in 2000.

In 2004, he moved to P.A Semi, serving as VP of engineering on its low-power mobile processors. He left in 2008 to join Apple, with the Cupertino company acquiring P.A Semi shortly after. Keller and the P.A Semi team went on to design Apple's A4 and A5 processors which were used in several Apple products, such as the iPhone and iPad.

Keller returned to AMD in 2012, to lead the development of the Zen and K12 microarchitectures, but left, again, after just three years to pursue other opportunities. This lead him to Tesla, where he worked as VP of autopilot hardware engineering. But that only last for two years as he then joined Intel in 2018.

Keller's resignation is with immediate effect and Sundari Mitra will take charge of a newly created IP Engineering Group focused on developing best-in-class, the company said.

Bobby Hellard

Bobby Hellard is ITPro's Reviews Editor and has worked on CloudPro and ChannelPro since 2018. In his time at ITPro, Bobby has covered stories for all the major technology companies, such as Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook, and regularly attends industry-leading events such as AWS Re:Invent and Google Cloud Next.

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