AMD Re-recruits Jim Keller as Chief of Processor Group

In what might be the best news to come out of the AMD camp in quite a while, the company has announced that it’s bringing Jim Keller back on board to become the Corporate Vice President and Chief Architect for CPU Cores. He’ll be reporting to the company’s CTO and Senior VP of Technology and Engineering, Mark Papermaster.

During his previous stint with AMD, Jim worked with a team on the K7 microarchitecture and went on to be the lead engineer for K8 – one of AMD’s biggest successes to date. After AMD, he went on to work at PA Semi, a firm which specialized in developing low-power ARM-based processors. With Apple’s acquisition of that company, Jim was then inherited by Apple and has no doubt played a large role in the development of its “A” SoC processors.

Jim’s history goes back far before his first time at AMD, so he’s as experienced as they come. For AMD, this re-hiring could prove to be vital, as the company has undoubtedly had a rough handful of years when battling the desktop and mobile market against Intel. Fresh out of Apple, Jim’s ideas and implementations could help get AMD back on the right track and become a fierce competitor once again.