AMD Attracts Apple's Top Chip Architect Jim Keller

AMD grabs the man from Apple who helped design the chips behind the iPhone, iPad, and contributed to the design of the MacBook Air.

AMD has had it kind of rough as of late. The company has lost a number of high profile employees over the last year, including Rick Bergman, Bob Feldstein, Eric Demers, Emilio Ghilardi, Bob Rivet, Marty Seyer, and John Bruno. In addition to some of their top guys jumping ship, the company late last year announced plans to cut a total of 1400 jobs. However, today AMD showed that the company still has what it takes to attract top talent. The company announced that Apple's top chip architect Jim Keller is jumping ship and joining AMD as the company's corporate vice president and chief architect for CPU cores.

Prior to his position at Apple as director of platform architecture, Keller was the VP of Design for PA Semi, which was purchased by Apple in 2008. Apple bought PA Semi for its engineering talent, which it planned to use to build custom chips for the iPhone, iPod, iPad, and other mobile devices. During Keller's time at Apple, Cupertino has churned out both the A4 and the A5.

Though the news comes as a surprise, Keller isn't exactly a stranger to AMD. From 1998 to 1999, Keller was a Senior Fellow at the company and lead architect for K8, co-author of the HT specification, co-author of the 64 bit x86 spec and part of the system engineering team that launched K7. In his new role as corporate VP and chief architect for CPU cores, he'll report directly to AMD CTO Mark Papermaster, who also served at Apple. 

Keller holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from Penn State University. He graduated in 1980.

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