In a surprise announcement, Intel VP of Silicon Engineering Group (SEG), Jim Keller has resigned from his position at the company. Keller is a well-known CPU architect and is responsible for Apple’s A4 and A5 chips, AMD’s K8 and Zen as well as Telsa’s custom self-driving processors which allowed the company to ditch NVIDIA’s third-party designs.
Although Keller hasn’t maintained one particular position for too long, veering from role to role every 5-6 years, this one was an especially short stint, lasting for just 2 years. In an interview with AT, he claimed that his job at Intel was to fix and refine the entire pipeline rather than to re-innovate the entire process.
It’s not certain what Keller fixed at Intel in just two years and what effect will his departure have on ongoing projects, but considering the kind of resources Team Blue has, it shouldn’t be a major problem. Regardless, he will continue to serve as a consultant for six months to assist with the transition.
Intel claims Keller has left for “personal reasons”. While that can mean many things, it certainly sounds like Big Blue doesn’t want to make it sound like a big deal.
Meanwhile, Intel has appointed a new set of individuals to take over the roles left vacant by Jim Keller:
- 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 focused on developing best-in-class IP.
- Gene Scuteri, an accomplished engineering leader in the semiconductor industry, 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. Hejmadi has over two decades of experience leading teams delivering advanced SoCs both inside and outside of Intel.
- Navid Shahriari, an experienced Intel leader, will continue to lead the Manufacturing and Product Engineering Group, which is focused on delivering comprehensive pre-production test suites and component debug capabilities to enable high-quality, high-volume manufacturing.
