Intel announced that Jim Keller, previously vice-president of Intel silicon engineering group, has left the company on June 11, citing personal reasons.
Keller is a top expert in chip design. Prior to Intel, Keller is known for his role in designing a series of chip architectures including the AMD K7, K8, and more recently the AMD Zen architecture. Keller also designed Apple’s A4 and A5 processors, as well as co-authored the x86-64 bit instruction set. Keller also worked at Tesla in 2016, where he helped to develop the Tesla HW 3.0 neural network accelerator for Tesla’s autopilot system. The chip is said to be capable of processing 2,300 frames per second, nearly 21 times more frames than Tesla’s previous solution. Almost immediately following his departure from Tesla in 2018, Keller joined Intel to develop its next-generation processors as the senior vice president of the silicon engineering group.
Intel announced the following leadership changes along with Keller’s departure in a major leadership reorganization. The changes are effective starting immediately:
- Sundari Mitra, the former CEO and founder of NetSpeed Systems and the current leader of Intel’s configurable intellectual property and chassis group, will lead a newly created IP engineering group.
- Gene Scuteri will head the Xeon and networking engineering group.
- Daaman Hejmadi will return to leading the client engineering group focused on system-on-chip (SoC) execution and designing next-generation client, device and chipset products.
- Navid Shahriari will continue to lead the manufacturing and product engineering group, which is focused on delivering pre-production test suites and component debug for high-volume manufacturing.
Keller will take on a consultant role during the transition for the next six months.
