Intel said on Thursday that it hired Jim Keller, a former Apple and Advanced Micro Devices chip architect that most recently led Tesla's Autopilot and low-voltage hardware efforts, to lead silicon engineering, including system-on-chip development and integration. He officially starts next week.
Before Tesla, Keller served as chief cores architect at AMD, where he led development of the Zen architecture, the keystone in the company's financial rebound. At Apple, he helped led a push into custom low-power smartphone chips, including the original A4 processor that powered the iPhone 4. He came to Apple in 2008 after the company acquired P.A. Semi, where he was vice president of engineering and chief architect.
"My lifelong passion has been developing the world’s best silicon products,” Keller said in a statement. “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.”