Fight Mode Engaged: Intel Poaches Jim Keller From Tesla To Head Up Silicon Engineering

When AMD released its first Zen-based processors last spring, the company had an awful lot riding on the success of the launch. After nearly a decade, the company was finally able to deliver not just competitive products, but in some cases, dominating products. After Ryzen launched, Intel was very quick to release Coffee Lake, which finalized the breaking of the quad-core mold that mainstream users were stuck with for way too long. Ryzen 2 launched last week, putting AMD even closer to Intel’s performance, while also giving us hope that Zen 2, due next year, will bring us IPC parity.

Clearly, Intel is concerned by AMD more now than it has been the past decade, and just as how Coffee Lake’s launch came so soon after Ryzen, Intel is wasting no time in trying to secure some of the industry’s best talent to bolster its defenses against the Zen bully.

A couple of months ago, Intel shocked the tech world by announcing the hiring of GPU mastermind Raja Koduri, who left AMD after what many considered to be a rough launch for Vega. We’ve since learned that Intel has plans to release its own graphics cards (something we’ve heard before, but the company’s never had the toolset and people it does now). We’ve also seen Radeon appear in select Intel CPUs, finally putting an end to tag-team rumors that have existed for at least the past decade.

Recently, AMD’s Radeon marketing lead (and fellow Canuck) Chris Hook announced his departure from the company, and to my knowledge, it hasn’t been confirmed where he’s going to appear next. It’s of course largely speculated that he’ll join Raja at Intel, and really, it wouldn’t be the least-bit surprising. Especially not when we learn that Intel is becoming so aggressive about its next moves, it’s just hired CPU engineering legend Jim Keller.

Keller is going to be moving from Tesla, where he was VP of Autopilot hardware and software, to Intel as a Senior Vice President, taking the lead on the company’s silicon engineering, focusing on SoC development and integration. It’s beginning to feel like Intel’s wanting a little Zen action of its own.

Before moving to Tesla, and then Intel, Keller previously worked on the designs of some classic AMD and Apple chips, including the AMD K7, K8, and K12, as well as a little arch called Zen. With Apple, he helped with the design of the A4 and A5 chips, and beyond that, he also cowrote HyperTransport and x86-64. A respectable list of accomplishments, to say the least!

It’s nice to see this kind of fight in Intel. One hire would be one thing, but both Koduri and Keller working for the same team sounds downright exciting. AMD and Tesla might not agree.