Jim Keller revealed that AMD canceled the K12 project after his departure
Jim Keller is a legendary chip architect who has worked at Intel, AMD, Apple, and Tesla, and participated in the development of AMD’s K7/K8/Zen series architecture, x86-64 instruction set, and HyperTransport bus, as well as Apple A4 to A7 chip development. During his tenure at Tesla, he was in charge of the autonomous driving chip project. Jim Keller has joined AI chip startup Tenstorrentr as president, CTO, and board member since ending his consulting job at Intel.
Recently, Jim Keller gave a brief overview of the various projects he has participated in in the past and the basics of chip design at an industry event he attended. It mentioned that after returning to AMD in 2012, he engaged in the development of Zen architecture, and formulated plans for Zen 2 and Zen 3 architecture. This means that the Ryzen 5000 series processors currently on the market are likely to be the last Zen series architecture projects Jim Keller participated in.
Jim Keller said that During his time at AMD, the team he led noticed that the cache design of Arm and x86 processors is basically the same in other aspects such as execution units. The only difference between the two is the decode unit, so it was decided to work on an Arm chip called K12. It has been reported in the past that AMD has a project called Project Skybridge to implement a shared interface between Arm and x86 architectures. With the same set of motherboards, users can choose the processor of the corresponding architecture according to their needs.It is revealed by Jim Keller that the K12 ARM CPU project was actually canceled after he left the company by certain managers. At the same time, Jim Keller also admitted that it was “fun” during his work at AMD.
Via: wccftech
