AMD poaches Keller from Apple's mobile chip team
A call to ARMs?
Jim Keller, formerly director of the platform architecture group at Apple, has become the newest recruit to AMD as part of CEO Rory Read's recent talent buying spree.
Keller has worked for AMD before, helping to develop its 64-bit Athlon and Opteron designs. He also coauthored the x86-64 processor instruction set, as well as working on several DEC Alpha designs. But for the last few years he's been concentrating on lower-power systems, first as a founding member of PA Semi and lately in his role at Apple.
Keller is joining as chief architect of AMD's microprocessor cores and will be working under Mark Papermaster, the former Apple hardware boss who left Cupertino after a brief sojourn in the wake of the iPhone 4 "antennagate" issues.
"Jim is one of the most widely respected and sought-after innovators in the industry and a very strong addition to our engineering team," said Papermaster in a canned statement.
"He has contributed to processing innovations that have delivered tremendous compute advances for millions of people all over the world, and we expect that his innovative spirit, low-power design expertise, creativity, and drive for success will help us shape our future and fuel our growth."
No doubt AMD is going to be looking to Keller's ARM experience as part of its plans for more hybrid chip architectures. AMD has already said it wants to fuse a Cortex-A5 chip onto future Fusion and Opteron builds for its TrustZone security system, and Keller will have a lot to offer on that topic.
But his experience with Apple could also be useful if, as some expect, AMD wants to do more with ARM systems at the low end. Intel is not having a lot of luck in the smartphone sector with its Atom line and AMD could be planning some new designs to nibble at a market Chipzilla wants badly.
Keller is the latest in a long line of hiring and firings instituted by Rory Read as he reorganizes, kicking out a lot of the old guard in favor of fresh meat. In July he snaffled Suresh Gopalakrishnan from Extreme Networks and last December he bagged Lisa Su from Freescale Semiconductor, and there are rumors that several other people are being sounded out. ®
COMMENTS
Re: I am not, to say the least of it, any fan of Intel but the following statement............
@Arctic Fox
The sentence "Intel is not having a lot of luck in the smartphone sector with its Atom line" is based on the vendor's reception of Intel's offerings, rather than consumer's reception (which as you point out, is too early to call since the bloke on the street hasn't yet been able to buy an Intel handset).
Tom's HW reckon it will take a while - and a few generations of chips- for Intel to build up relationships with device manufacturers who are currently happy enough working with ARM.
Re: I am not, to say the least of it, any fan of Intel but the following statement............
One of the reasons that Intel has such a hard time in mobile is that Google has refused all the x86 ports submitted by Intel, so Intel has had to fork Android to make it work on x86.
It's also why Intel has stuck with Meego/Tezin/whatever it's called today, as an alternative to Android...
@Dave 126 That is a fair enough point though I have to say..............
..............that if that was what the author meant it was certainly not clear from the article! -:)
I am not, to say the least of it, any fan of Intel but the following statement............
"Intel is not having a lot of luck in the smartphone sector with its Atom line"
...........is a touch premature isn't it? AFAIK they are are only just beginning to release phones based on Intel's chip. Don't you guys read Reg Hardware? Where the "San Diego" was reviewed about four weeks ago? It had the subheading "Intel’s first smartphone aims to shake up the mid-range market." (My added emphasis). They said further: "a retail version of Intel’s own Gigabyte-built smartphone reference platform built around a hyper-threading 1.6GHz Z2460 Atom "
http://forums.reghardware.com/forum/1/2012/07/04/orange_san_diego_intel_based_android_smartphone_review/
I know that the mobile tech sector moves very fast but not that flaming fast. I still have no idea how Intel's phone chips are going to do and neither have you. I am afraid that that line was an example of rhubarb journalism. You know, as in the sound actors make when they wish to make it sound as if they are saying something.
