Acclaimed AMD Engineer Jim Keller Leaves To Pursue Other Opportunities

AMD has just lost another one of its great employees, legendary chip designer Jim Keller. Interestingly, AMD managed to lure Jim back to its stable just over three years ago, and at that time, it felt like the burst of hope we needed that AMD would in fact become competitive in the CPU market again.

Well, that hope isn't quite waned because of Jim's departure, because he was brought on to help with AMD's next-gen Zen architecture, which has yet to be released. That's due next year and could very-well prove to be a very competitive offering. At least, we sure hope so, because AMD is long overdue for tasting genuine success on the processor side. It's hard to say whether its lack of delivering a stellar product in recent years has effectively let Intel rest on its laurels, but given what that company's Skylake architecture brings to the table, it doesn't seem so (yet).

Keller's work led to the creation of AMD's first dual-core CPU

Nonetheless, the loss of an engineer like Jim is great. He has numerous accolades, such as being responsible for AMD's great K8 architecture (eg: Athlon 64), and he also had a hand in the design of the K7. In 2004, Keller moved to P.A Semi, a company which was acquired by Apple in 2008. From there, he went on to help design Apple's A4 and A5 processors, and worked there until 2012 when he was absorbed by AMD again.

Where Keller goes from here is anyone's guess, but as these things sometimes go, it might not take long before we get that question answered.