It looks like Intel has another high-profile hire. It seems these keep on coming for the company. Jim Keller, who was the VLSI guru who led the team behind AMD’s comeback in the x86 processor market with “Zen”, has reportedly quit his job at Telsa to join Intel. After his work on “Zen” he had joined Tesla to work on self-driving car hardware. Keller joins former AMD employee Raja Koduri who led AMD’s Radeon Technologies Group.
With many high-profile hires from Intel in the past couple of months we can speculate as to what Intel is planning. Based on what we’ve seen it seems there is a shake-up in the company and that Koduri and others are putting together a team for a clean-slate project, which after the launch of AMD’s “Zen” architecture seems to be needed. The last time Intel did a clean-slate project was ten years ago with “Nehalem”.
