Intel announced on Thursday that it has hired Jim Keller to head its Silicon Engineering. Which includes system-on-chip development and integration. Intel says that Keller will bring more than “20 years of experience in x86 and ARM-based microarchitecture design across a broad range of platforms”. This includes mobile devices, PCs, servers and even cars. All of which are areas that Intel is either heavily invested in, or are looking to enter for growth. While Intel isn’t big in the mobile space right now, it is looking to get there, with 5G launching in the next few years.
In a prepared statement, Intel noted that “Jim is one of the most respected microarchitecture design visionaries in the industry, and the latest example of top technical talent to join Intel.” Intel has been adding a number of new top-level executives to its team in recent months, in an effort to grow the company a bit more. Intel has begun to stagnate after PCs sales started to decline. Though that is not so much the case anymore with PCs, but Intel did almost completely miss out on the smartphone revolution. Now it’s looking to make up for it in the 5G era, and producing modems that will compete with Qualcomm, though it’ll still have a steep hill to climb there, as Qualcomm does have such a big stranglehold on the market already.
Keller isn’t new to the mobile industry either, after working at Apple during the iPhone 4 development phase. He worked on the A4 and A5 processors at Apple, before moving on to AMD, where he led development of the Zen architecture, and then to Tesla serving as vice president of Autopilot and Low Voltage Hardware. So Keller has definitely worked on a fair bit of projects in the past few years, in virtually of the areas that Intel is looking to grow in, especially in autonomous vehicles. Intel says that Keller will officially begin his role at the company on April 30.