A long career
Keller is not a publicity seeker, but he has had a remarkable career as a chip architect. He started at Digital Equipment Corp., where he played a role in the 1990s design of the DEC Alpha processors.
In 1998, he moved to AMD, where he worked on the Athlon (K7) processor and led the K8 project that disrupted Intel’s 64-bit Itanium chips and gave AMD its first foothold in the lucrative market for server chips. Then, in 1999 — as the dotcom bubble was growing — he left for startup SiByte, which Broadcom acquired in 2000 for $2 billion in stock. When the bubble collapsed, so did the value of that deal and Broadcom’s own hypergrowth.
In 2004, Keller moved on to head engineering at P.A. Semi, a startup focused on mobile processors. Then he moved to Apple in early 2008. Apple also bought the P.A. Semi team, which went to work on the A series processors for iPhones. That was part of Steve Jobs’ strategy to become independent from chip makers, and it turned out to be a brilliant move that saved Apple billions of dollars.
In 2012, Keller sensed a shift coming again. Advances in PC processors were slowing. He rejoined AMD to lead a new microarchitecture, dubbed Zen. AMD launched the first chips based on Zen in 2017, and for the first time in years the company is rapidly gaining share on Intel.
In 2015, Keller left AMD and joined Tesla to work on autopilot engineering for the company’s electric cars.
Starting in 2018, Keller’s goal at Intel was to help streamline product development and get the company back into the top position in designs. As a result of his departure, Intel realigned its top chip design staff.
Not necessarily. To quote Venturebeat's article above which chronicles his career, he's bounced around fairly often, as talented people often will.
If you remember the other news of today, Intel's release of their 4+1 3D Stacked processors for the 7w mobile market, a market I haven't even heard AMD mention they are targeting. I'm sure AMD would love to have his talents working in that area. IF Windows 10X comes to fruition and we see a reemergence of Windows mobile devices which can run native x86 applications, AMD isn't going to want to let Intel have free reign.
